Hi, been a while since I have been in the discussion, but thought I would post something related to the latest game changes.
The first week after the fork, I played 3 or 4 days but have not since then due to lack of time mostly. I share most of the feelings that have already been stated by others.
I like the random generation of the player and the effects it has on making human domination harder. There is a certain feeling of gambling and uniqueness at that moment when creating a player. I found myself creating players just to hope they would generate in a favorable spot for PVP or coin gathering. If they generated in a poor spot,t I would send them to gather 5+ HUC and bank/die.
Alarms are necessary and the only way to be able to play without having to watch every block making sure nobody spawned on top of me.
The random bank locations are nice also. I think a parameter of not having them generate within 50 blocks of each other would be nice. I noticed sometimes you might get 5-10 banks pretty much in the same spot. If you had some rules for minimum space, you might not need to increase the number of banks.
Regarding PVP, I think the idea of tokens/life steal does work. However, I did not have nearly the success with PVP as Snail said he has had. Maybe it is a timezone issue based on my opponents. I never found anybody that was AFK. So this meant I traded a lot of destructs burning 20HUC multiple times. I never killed a single opponent during any PVP attempts. I found myself at the end just turning away when the opponent was clearly there as to not waste HUC or time. I think everybody I tried to attack was watching name_pending also (just a note since it is more fair since I watch it.)
If my motivation was higher, I would probably start running bots again since the current environment I think turns the advantage back to 24/7 bots. I could see running 1000 bots easily again since there really isn't any risk, especially if you can get them paired up. Unless some really unfortunate network badluck occurred, you could not kill a bot, and you would lose with 2 on 1.
The chatter around armor, attack, destruct patterns, etc... are all great and added gameplay features. The trapping and invisibility doesn't do much for me, and I think would be even more problematic to the novice player.
I only skimmed the posts since I was so far behind, but there seemed to be posts from new players struggling with PVP. After pruning, I think providing a way for the novice/gatherer to get introduced into the game is important so they can grow some experience and fun with the game instead of throwing them into the fire with wira, mithral, snail, myself, etc... to get defeated, lose the HUC they just purchased, and have a poor taste in their mouth.