Not sure if I am totally on board with the idea of removing Warband's bread-and-butter gamemodes or not. I never particularly cared for LiF-type games or the Persistent World mod. However what you are proposing most certainly sounds like it has the potential to be better than both, but only time will tell. Anyways, a few questions for you guys...
1) Will there be an arena or some sort of building that you can enter and it takes you to what is essentially an NA1/EU1 style battle server ( or also "mock" sieges similar to NA2/EU2)? Is this how you would level up your character? I don't really see how you can level up to a warrior from a peasant if there is perma-death.
2) Just how large of an impact does your level or your skills have on your combat performance? Will it be similar to what you originally planned for M:BG where everyone has a cookie-cutter basic build and leveling up simply allows for you to customize this build to be agility or strength biased?
3) What do you gain from leveling up? The ability to customize your build/weapons to tailor them to your preferred fighting style? How does one go about leveling up, exactly?
4) I am assuming since this is not a survival game that food/water/other essential resources won't be necessary? I mean, maybe you sell your city's famous wines to another for profit, but you don't need to constantly worry about your "hunger bar" emptying, do you?
5) Let's say that there is a group of 5-10 friends who decide to roleplay bandits. They camp a major trade route where they intercept the (player-controlled) workers/AI/whoever does the trading between different outposts/cities/towns. Now this band of outlaws are all highly skilled players, let's say that they played crpg and their skills transferred over to M:BG. The city they are harassing are is run by a brand new faction who has had limited combat experience. The city sends out a band of 10-15 of their best warriors to uproot these brigands. Their assault gets decimated since they did not expect players in a "new" game to have such a high skill level already. Obviously it would be rather difficult to get a surplus of players online at once to march on these skilled bandits with overwhelming numbers, so is there some way that the city could deal with them? Could they send out a small AI-army of 50 or so soldiers to march against this small band, similar to how you would march against another large AI-army?
6) Along the lines of that last proposed scenario, would there be some way to post wanted posters in cities, where people can then be killed on sight (without consequences befalling the killer) if they are listed on a bounty board? This way skilled bandits may be able to harass people in the wilderness, but if they ever wanted to use all that gold then they would have to risk entering a hostile city sooner or later to buy better gear.
7) Finally, what are the consequences of "permadeath?" Do you lose all of your skills and customized/heirloomed weapons (if customized weapons still exist) when you switch over to an "alt" character? Or maybe you only lose a small percent of your skills/level because your main character was busy "training" your alts in their downtime? Or do you lose nothing at all, except maybe the gear you have on you (which would still really suck if customizing weapons is a chore)?
Sorry for having so many questions, but I figured it would be best to get them all out of the way in one post.
