Thunderdome: The First Class

On the 1st December of last year, 300 announced the creation of Thunderdome, a PvP training zone in Vindorel. Over a month has gone by since then and apparently, it has been a success. Ten Kulch had the following to say in an interview with the Telegraph:

'How is Thunderdome doing?
The first class is going quite well. As with Night Squires, the new batch of students eventually separated into the truly active, and the mostly inactive. The last full moon cycle saw some intense PvP between the participants. Presently it's the new moon phase of learning and exercises. Several players have been grinding away diligently on my daily questions and timing exercises. We've had lots of great discussions so far. Some of them already had experiences with tournaments and such, so they are asking more advanced questions. Right now we are a few days away from another full moon PvP cycle starting. I expect them to put the classroom learning to good use in there.
I have also had considerable interest from people for the spring classroom. More than for winter, really. I think many players weren't able to immediately send a city in December, but it's easier to plan for spring.
I plan on publishing the questions for each classroom phase, so that people can follow along. I do see the discussions as more important, and then actually trying concepts in PvP.
Before anyone asks, I am not publishing answer keys to the questions. That would defeat the purpose of students actually considering and discussing things, and then arriving at their answers.

How many people have participated this time?
About ten. Of those, 5 or 6 are active, learning, and fighting. We had approved more, but some of those folks never showed up (which I expected, that happened a lot in Night Squires too).
This classroom is designed to accomodate that pattern. In NS we had a lot of barely active or outright inactive accounts start to pile up. We would recruit continuously, which led to a lot of repeating of information. In this method, we take people for a specific length of time, to learn the same stuff together, and there's a built-in method to clean the classroom of inactives every 3 months.

How many have looked into joining the spring class so far?
12-15 people have asked about it (or asked to join immediately, and referred to spring). What that might become in terms of actual students, I cannot predict.'

The questions that have been set can be found here

Author: Eowan The Short