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I'm about to start on a new project which is intended to be a fighting game, where the players fight each other. I haven't started the actual design or development yet, so I figured I should start a discussion here to sort out some potential issues, to figure out which features the game should have (and not have) etc.

I'm thinking each player should have 1 character, which will fight other player's characters.
You have a range of powers to choose between, but you have a limited number of them that you can bring into and use in the actual battle. This means that you'll have to try and find powers with combos and strengths that can be used to defeat your opponent, or with good defenses against his strengths.

Death is not an issue, you either win or loose a battle. The winner gets points, and I've thought that he might be able to pick one of your powers to take for himself (perhaps only if his victory was particularly impressive). If this is too harsh, he might "copy" the power you used the most instead, to remove the frustration of loosing a good power to your enemy (please give me your advice of which approach would be the best).

I'm thinking it will be possible to gain new powers regularly without having to fight, so each player will have a good chance at becoming more powerful.

A new player can probably not defeat an established player due to lack of experience with the mechanics, and a limited range of powers, but other than that there shouldn't be too much difference between a new and an old player in this game.

I'm planning to add as many powers as possible into the game, and will try to add new ones as the game goes on. Rather than nerfing powers if they become too powerful, I'd try to add new powers that might help reducing the effect of a overpowered power. Do you think this is a risky approach? In most games where new features are added regularly, there's always a risk of overpowered combos, so I need to have a way of dealing with this, and nerfing is never a popular choice...

Sounds very interesting..is this going to be a browser game?

Yeah, probably a facebook game :p

Cool I would play if you get it done

It sounds like an interesting idea. One thing to consider with powers is to give yourself some "strings to pull." Try to work out in an equation an easy way for you to adjust the potency of a power with just a tweak here and there. Many games even all the way into the big time mmos have failed to pay attention to this factor when it came to player vs player action and ended up failing to different degrees. Having something be overpowered is one thing. Having something that has no way of putting it back in balance without major overhaul is another.

New abilities to balance would also be nice but I think it would be nicer to have new abilities that don't make some others totally obsolete as well. I've found through many games that have taken the bump the bar up approach that they finally just have to break down and redesign the entire system at some point anyways. WoW would be a large scale example of that approach and revamp that I could give. I realize it isn't the same exact thing but it is the same exact problem and popular for an example if that makes sense.

Good luck with your project!

Yeah, I'm thinking the powers should have some basic stats that I can just edit and tweak. For example, I imagine I'll have different types of damage (not sure if I'll go classic with fire, cold, lightning etc, or if I'll try to be more creative). That will allow me to have powers that can have various levels of resistance against certain damage types (or even immunity in rare cases). I can mix up damage types in some powers, and I can give bonuses to certain damage types.

The players will have a basic attack that can deal some damage no matter what type of powers they bring into the fight.

Each player will have, say 100, hit points. The goal is to take down the opponents HP before you reach zero or below yourself. Some rare items will give you a small increase in total HP, some will heal small amounts of damage during combat, but other than that, it's all about dishing out damage before your opponent takes you down.