It seems we were all surprised by NPC wages running this month. The question has been raised a few times: was the code changed, or was there a secret sync? (Un)fortunately--depending on your perspective--nothing changed in the code that was expected to cause it to run. NPC wages have been enabled for years, but traditionally one or more bugs or data consistency issues caused the wages code to crash, similar to how faction dissolution didn't work for a long period of time because one faction due to dissolve would crash the software every time. Apparently, this month there were somehow no inconsistent NPCs and the script ran to conclusion.

I know some people have hastily done things like fire NPCs who are owed wages for next month, and others have been affected by an existing bug in NPC inventory, causing them to fire all of their NPCs, not just the ones they selected. There is, regrettably, nothing we can do to recover those specific NPCs, as the manpower cost of it is just too large, but if you contact Erek and CC Arjuna and me over the coming days we can try to work out some kind of compensation. Please remember this game is a beta and unexpected behavior is fairly common.

NPC wages will be explicitly disabled and will not run next month. We have been quietly working on a revamped version for some time, but it has not yet been queued for release due to some performance issues. There will be an announcement describing the changes before it is turned on.