I am still confused about what the persistent world is all about though, so I posed this question
Persistent world means just that: they'll have a single "game" set up with a persistent world. Players will compete to conquer that world, probably forming guilds and alliances and so on.
Yeah I suppose it will be something like that. Once an alliance/guild etc. conquers the world, that game is over. I guess so at least.
PS. Lot of questions have been posted so far, and the devs ignored lot from those. Hopefully we will get more answers soon enough.
PS #2. Double post, sorry.
PS #3.
Even more infos about the random map generator:
"The game not only will feature random map generation but our current internal build does feature random map generation. It's nowhere near perfect yet; one of the biggest problems with our approach to map generation is that we want to be able to create really rad looking maps like, say, that of Middle Earth or some of the old-school Final Fantasy games with as little precreated assets as possible. The problem, though, is that getting consistently awesome results takes a lot of tweaking and rewriting of the map generation algorihtm.
It's definitely coming along, though. We will have a map editor (one of our many editors) for the creation/modification of entire maps but we will also have a system in place to create smaller map pieces that can be included in the generation process. So if you want to make a really well thought-out and recognizable island but not an entire map you can save out that island for later use in custom maps or you can add it to the map generation process for inclusion in a random map."
Sounds awesome.