Most of your questions are answered in the FAQ (You can find that in the newbie forums). This post would go best in the newbie forums, but I\'ll answer what I can anyway.
How will the griefers be dealt with?
There are GMs on-line who will be able to ban griefers. Possibly by I.P. address.
Also, what kind of limits will there be to gaining skills? Will it be a level based system? will there be no limit to the number of skills you can gain and, eventually, max them all out? I\'m not opposed to limiting characters to \"professions\", but I would prefer to do more with one character than have to log-on to separate characers to perform various tasks.
Well, to gain skills you will have to train in them. For example, the more you use a sword, the better you become at using a sword. Your character can become whatever you want him to become. However, once developed, you might find it hard to start all over again training something new (For example, if you constantly train with a sword and become extremely good with a sword, you\'ll have to start training magic from scratch if that\'s what you want to train).
How will character names be handled? Will another player\'s name be hidden until that player is introduced?
This has already been discussed and it was concluded that player names will be shown all the time.
And, finally, any idea when the next release will be?
To prevent disappointment, the Devs are not giving out any release dates. The Dev team is not stable like in other commercial games, meaning that a developer can leave the team any time he or she wishes, so it is hard to give even an approximate date.
Also, the game engine PS uses is also open-source so it is constantly changing. Some changes might incur changes in the coding of planeshift itself.
I hope this answers your questions
Edit: Also, I forgot to tell you that PS will not have a level-based system. PS\'s system will be skill-based.
