Thanks for your patience everyone. This will be a multi-part post that will happen over time. To start off with I'm going to explain some of the top level ideas for the future:

Pit of War originally began as a game that was meant to be a supplement to your regular gaming schedule, and as such there wasn't a lot to do each day. Many of the early adopters enjoyed this. As the game grew, more players kept requesting more to do and some wanted faster progress. This resulted in the game you see today.

In the early days, gladiators did five tavern runs each day and fought twice per day, once at 2am PST and once at 2pm PST. This type of format actually created a much richer PvP environment since the focus was on each fight because there weren't so many of them and gave players time to think and strategize more. Rivalries could be created more easily and moving up and down in the rankings felt more important as you had at least 12 hours to stew over a loss or bask in victory for a win and gloat. Each fight was important. This was especially true if you were challenged. For technical reasons and in the hopes to accommodate the newer generations of gamer (e.g. less than age 30-35) unfamiliar with this format for a game the switch was made to the arena token system we have today. This was met with mixed results as many of the hardcore players didn't like it, and many of the new generation loved it.

I'm of the opinion at this point that a better compromise can be made and that is what I'm working on now. Areas of the game that have an arena token like system or energy based system allowing players to fight when they want and are able to, and areas of the game that have the slower scheduled format hyper focusing the players on each fight. The challenge with the slower scheduled format style like in the old days of PoW is when a new player checks out the game it can be boring if they can't fight right away and see what it is all about. Imagine if you check out a game, make a character and then it tells you to come back in 10 hours. In today's marketplace where we have literally over a million games at our fingertips, boredom or not catching someone's interest in those first few precious minutes means a lost customer and wasted marketing dollars. The good news is I think I've come up with a few solutions for this which I'll be sharing later.

Most likely all XP and training points will be earned via the arena. All other areas of the game will simply enable players to earn more gold and loot if they so desire. As such, they will be optional. A player choosing to skip all other areas of the game should expect that they'll need to support the game if they want to play with a full stable and all the shiny toys of destruction. Areas other than the arena will offer players the ability to earn and win shiny toys. As is the case with all free games, it'll be a money vs time trade-off, not too dissimilar to now. I'll do my best to design it in such a way so the balance is as good as possible.

Now onto some details...