Personally I love the idea of multiples/duplicates; my hesitance comes from the fact that it isn't a focus of the game. It's not so much 'here's a verse where you are something else!' as 'here's a verse where they think you're just another player!' I don't want it to become a driving factor in the game plot, if that makes sense, but I'm otherwise open to it.

Definitely leaning towards text; some of the other feedback I've gotten leads me to thinking about doing a monthly post in the meme comm that's all anon, and allows people to play at being natives, period; or natives posting on other things. Basically, filling out the forums, so to speak.

The class system is loosely grouped in to two spectrums; offense/defense, and physical/magic. Players pick one end of the spectrum while apping, and get access to two base classes; eg, the offense spectrum gives you the offense/physical of Rogue, and offense/magic of Mage. If you apped Physical, you get Rogue and the defense/physical of Soldier. For ease of grouping ICly - not that it'd work in an actual MMO - respeccing basically allows you to switch your class, and getting experience in both is key to the secondary/prestige class system. (Eg- leveling in both Soldier and Rogue with a focus in Offense leads to a secondary class access of Duelist, which has a couple Defensive aspects but is still very much Offensive. Vice versa, you get Knight). That way if we have two players, odds are one of them can switch to a Defensive (which includes healing/tanking)-style class, and the other can switch to an Offensive (for damage dealing).
IT'S VERY MUCH A HANDWAVEY SYSTEM but I'll take a look at those two games and see if I can draw some inspiration!