Q: How many servers will there be?
At release time, there will only be one instance of the world running. It will run on more than one computer, but you shouldn't care much about that as a player.
It is our intent to keep the number of world instances as low as possible. Ideally, we would only create new worlds to cater to different tastes, for example different PvP preferences, but in fact there will be some upper limit on the number of supported players on one server and we will likely have to create a new instance of the world for performance reasons at some point.
Q: Why don't I see more information about game content (races, places, backstory)?
We have gone at this thing (building an MMORPG) kind of backwards from the way it seems to be commonly done. We knew in what genre (Tolkein-esque fantasy) we were interested, and we knew what we were finding lacking in the current offerings (depth of the world and ability for players to run the world). Since the initial two team members were programmers, we then started building the infrastructure to make a massively online fantasy world with lots of different avenues for gameplay. Over time, we flesh out the details of what races are available, backstory for the worlds, exactly what combat maneuvers and spells we support, etc.
We actually think this has worked out to our favor. Instead of creating a community web site where some people get together and write storylines, race histories, and the like, which fizzles out before a playable game of any kind comes into being, we have a playable game, and now we're putting together the history, the list of supported mechanics and gameplay. We can do this knowing what our engine can support, and knowing that what we produce will make it into a playable game.
Q: Will there be zones or will the world be zonesless?
Zoneless, although it is possible we will allow travel between the world instances, and that would be zoned (and probably fairly unusual to boot).
