Firstly i think it worth stating, as most of you already know, that proper game development takes a fair bit of time.. something i haven't had much of lately. So the initial battle system will be pretty raw and 'basic'. Its quite likely that you'll get slain for no justifiable reason, or the whole thing will just not work, or it'll be easily exploited, etc etc. The initial play will probably be a great let-down.
It will help enormously if you can put on your 'alpha-tester', rather than 'player', hat for a week or two.
PvP is always difficult to balance, particularly so with this system which is aimed at having a few players together and its difficult to test much until its in your hands. It'll take a few iterations and client patches to get right.
One broader issue we'll face is how it affects people who hang around the game in small. If you're challenged while AFK you will automatically engage in battle after a time-limit, so theres a fair chance you'll return and find yourself dead, or worse.
Assuming everything was vaguely functioning right, the system will probably only work reasonably well with a fair few people around - at least on the order of the 20-30 concurrent we've regularly been getting recently. I'm sure a lil email (and maybe a lil indie news post) offering the opportunity of some gore and violence will get the numbers up easily enough, but of course I dont want to do that until its a bit more solid.
Good bug reports, ideas and details of any exploits you find will be immensely useful and help get to that point more rapidly
.To manage all that, the process of selecting the 'Great King' will be staged.. hopefully we'll crown a king after the first run through (and they'll probably have gotten there through bugs, exploits or indifference) then we'll 'reset' and do it again, and again. Once i feel we've got a reasonably robust and fair system, we'll reset again, gather a few people together and do a proper run to select the GK. (Ohh.. i've only just noticed that.. perhaps its a sign! :] )
Ok, enough nattering
One final point - for the next few nights, alongside attempting to 'finish' off the code i'll be tinkering with the tech-tree a bit, speeding things up and maybe simplifying a few steps in the vein of the chapter 1b stuff we ran on sunday.
