I doubt the coding issue is that dramatic. some Cryptic missions have NPCs that change allegiance when you talk to them. this suggests to me that the base code is in place and functional.

Certainly possible mark. After all didn't someone on this board a few months say that when a programmer says something "can't be done" what they really mean is "don't bother me with that right now."

Pretty much any system/feature/asset/map/kitchen sink could be added to the Foundry, but it takes dev time to do it and for whatever reason, they haven't been willing to spend the time.

The ability to make NPCs disappear had better be in the works for the NWN Foundry, and thus the STO Foundry. This isn't one of those things where saying "it can't be done" is acceptable. Especially for NWN if the Foundry is going to be more of a focal point of game play (as level creation was in previous NWNs) then you need to be able to hide NPCs.

That could work (and get around the kill-exploit issue), as long as they give us a decent array of transition effect options (beam out, fall down dead, get vaporized, blow up, etc.) to go with it.