Well, I will answer one, two and four first. It might take quite a while for me to do number three. So let me begin with number four.

I expect a character or two to die. It might be better sometimes to kill off a character just because their potential had diminished to nothing. Sometimes there are characters in rps like this who just run their course but start to lag behind the others. In some ways, we can compare these characters to people with a reading disability. They start out normal like all the others but then they start to lag behind. While the others advance along a path at a steady rate, they start to slow down. Eventually these characters will become too far behind to be saved from the opponents who would be advancing in power

As for the crews. It is hard for crews to work when we either have a character with their own crew of npcs and then a character with a crew of characters. While the character crew grows in power quickly, the npc crew will lag behind. Then we are placed in the same sort of position as a character who can't advance fast enough to keep up with the rest. So, I would expect about two crews if not one larger crew. Unlike the Strawhats, we aren't main characters who can hold their own in a battle against sixty marines at once Maybe later on in the story we can, but currently we can't. So it is hard to decide how crews will work. We are either left to force everybody into a single crew or separate players into equal crews for the sake of balance. But, unlike the strawhats, we will more than likely have a couple npcs on the ships no matter what.

Now to move to number two, I would suggest moving on to Dawn Island. It is the hometown of Luffy after all and it would be a logical first step in journey to find the One Piece.