Founders, earned titles and portraits

Some things in Vesper City can't be bought, at any price. They are given for what you did. This page is about three of them: the Founder flair, earned titles and earned portraits.

Founders of Vesper City

A Founder is a thank-you to the people who were here before the city opened its doors:

• the Founding Families: players who played regularly during the beta, on many different days over several weeks, not just a visit or two. Staff go through the list by hand, and staff and test accounts don't count.

A beta invite, or being carried over at launch, is not enough on its own: everyone has to have played regularly, and staff grant Founder by hand.

Founder status is only for what happened before the city opened: staff close the window at launch, and after that nobody new becomes a Founder. You get it once, for good, and it is never for sale: not in the Store, the Gold Shop, a crate or a reward.

A Founder gets three things, all cosmetic:

• a small Founder flair next to their name (it never changes the colour of the name);
• the earned title Founder of Vesper City;
• a Founder portrait, a face nobody else can pick.

The gold Founder badge on a profile and the small gold mark by a name mean the same thing: that player helped build the city before it opened.

If staff ever have to take Founder status away, the title and portrait go with it quietly, and your own written title comes back.

A name shows one mark at most: if a Founder is also staff or holds a role such as Columnist, the Staff badge or the role mark shows beside the name instead (see Staying safe and reporting). The Founder badge on the profile stays.

Earned titles

Your profile can show a title under your name. You can write your own, but a few titles can't be typed: you can only pick them once you have earned them. Open Edit profile and choose from the list of earned titles you hold. Choose the written one again whenever you like. See Your profile and privacy for what others can see.

Earned faces

You pick a face for your character in Account → Your face (or when you create your character). A handful of faces are free for everyone. Most of the others are earned by playing: they show greyed out, with a line saying how to earn them, a bar with your progress (for example "4 / 10") and how many players already have them.

The first ones come quickly: run three of the Don's errands, pull off ten crimes, collect your daily reward seven days in a row, win 25 fights, finish three courses, train at the gym, enjoy your nights out, let a home, reach your career's top rank. Others take longer: leading a gang as its Don, an Iron medal (see Respect and medals), having an idea from the Idea box built into the game. New earned faces arrive from time to time.

A few faces are secret: they show as "???" until you earn them. Keep playing and you may stumble on one.

There are also faces for special people: the Founder face and three closed beta faces for the testers who helped before the city opened, and later a few thank-you faces for players who support the game in the Store. The thank-you faces are well dressed, but the most striking faces can only be earned by playing.

Once you earn a face it is yours to keep, even if you later step down as Don or the face is no longer offered. A face is either earned or paid for, never both: nothing you can buy unlocks an earned face. When a face can no longer be earned (the Founder face after launch, for example), it disappears from the picker for everyone who doesn't have it, rather than staying locked forever.

Tips

• Earned titles and portraits are a quiet way to show where you have been.
• If you are a beta tester and want to be sure you are carried over, sign in with the email you used for the beta.