I've heard mutterings about AqPVP for awhile, but wasn't really sure what it was about.

For people who don't know as part of 3.0 there is a plugin in the works called AqPVP meant to overhaul how PVP works on Civcraft. Many people aren't happy about this, but shockingly I can't seem to find a substantial discussion over it. Most things seem restricted to muttering about Harry Potter PVP.

So I want to hear from the community, what they think needs done to combat to properly balance it and what the community feels like is missing from AqPVP.

I'm hoping this can be a civil and respectful discussion of what needs done rather than a bashing of hard work others have put into development. They can be wrong, but not idiots. If this seems to be going a different direction I'll probably just delete this so keep that in mind

To start things off here's my view of some of the pros and cons of AqPVP from a basically PVP noob

Pros:

• Adds a lot of new variables for us to tweak
• Makes PVP more complicated and thus means there's a more natural skill progression than what could be done with something like SkillUp (a plugin I have bad feelings about, but that's a subject for another post)
• Provides for possibly a more engaging and fun experience.

Cons:

• Possibly too prescriptive. Looks like thing can be mixed and matched though
• Too many things for us to tweak
• Too skill based
• [edit: retracted, closer inspection and it's fine, I'd rather it had a full suit of unit tests, but almost no bukkit plugins seem to have that] I'm not sure about the architecture (general program structure), I'd prefer something where things are more compartmentalized and more easily expandable. I also noticed a number of constants that probably should be eventually be part of the config and a number of static variables which is something I regretted doing in Bastion because it made unit testing basically impossible, but this shouldn't mater to the end user and is perfectly normal for any bit of software. Software engineering is never perfect and hobby work even less so and there is the whole thing about the pot calling the kettle black especially seeing as AqPVP seems better than Bastion architecturally [edited because I somehow missed that I didn't finish the sentence]

Things to make it better:

• Add more number based bonuses, possibly more conflict oriented factories (expand the structure system which doesn't actually seemed to be documented in the readme, but seems to be meant for this kind of thing). Numbers should win over strategy in Civcraft, but some specialization is still a good idea.
• Remove some spells and focus on balancing a narrow selection, remember to have no one equilibrium best class, apparently this is often achieved by making certain classes or items counter others in such a way that the "best" play style tend to evolve over time.

What do people think? What's needed what isn't?