hohiro: I wonder why people see PVP so problematic, it will add more single player experience, too. and considering it will be quite near to the board game, this is just like the boardgame is nowadays, people playing against each other and getting points with a high score list. Something I dont really need, but one can play with friends in one of the arenas and hopefully against comp opponents, too.
This is no action game, its a TBS .... for people wanting massive multiplayer and action there is MWO.
It's not just PvP but any multiplayer in general. For people only playing single player any resources spend on faciliating multplayer is wasted. There is also real and founded fear of developers spending resources on multiplayer in expense of single player, not to mention money essentially ending up being wasted as servers get shut down early due to lack of player base.
Indies especially need to be mindful of recources they have in their disposal and what their team and engine is capable of as wrong decision may well end up sinking the whole project (whether people like it or not, implementing multiplayer tends to be expensive, more so if server infrastructure is involved, no matter how you develop it).
One example is Darkout where devs spend half year or more trying to implement multiplayer only to conclude their current engine could not handle it and running out of funds in the process. While there's plans to porting the game to Unity, it's been 5 months since any kind of update anywhere so it raises suspicion that worse came to worst. Not that their update earned them any favors, considering it outlined their plans to release rest of the game, including the Unity port, as paid DLC.