If i'm not incorrect, and I definitely may be, they just launched a big expansion. (I had a RIFT trial with them for 30 days and know they send me ALL THE SPAM MAIL, only reason i've noted it.)
Aren't additional folks usually hired for those and then released once the expansion is out as a fairly regular studio tactic?
Yep, major expansion for RIFT just hit. This is pretty standard.
Hire on a bunch of staff for the expansion, let them go once it's released. Anyone hired from Paragon would have been hired after the expansion was basically out the door, so you don't have to worry about their jobs. This is just the normal development hiring cycle at work.
It's not like Disney, where they recently fired the majority of their game studios except for Junction Point and are looking to outsource a lot of game development going forward instead of handling it themselves(why did they get picked as a target for spamming about CoH again?).