The first option seems nearly impossible to plot. It's essentially a free-for-all that favors combat-prepped characters, which would be fine for me in theory (I play one combat-heavy character (liason), and then this behind-the-scenes guy), but the thing is, the majority of characters on the island aren't ready to fight each other. More accurately, they're not ready to pick enemies, and doing so would be hard...for many of us, you'd have to rely on a random number generator, or something of the sort. You could do the usual 'who wants to die, who wants to kill' plot post, but IMO you'd be passing up a huge opportunity for character development and CR advancement that could pass on to the next phase. You say that the one-on-one option would be repetitive, but I don't think that's the case. People, at least people like myself, would be more interested in reading one-on-one fights--though only if the players had a say in choosing the match-ups. If characters were paired up (or, realistically, paired themselves up) with characters with whom they already had CR, it wouldn't be repetitive at all. Yes, it would all end in death, but in DIFFERENT deaths, if not in form than in emotion. EV has shown itself to be fantastic in writing bracket text and internal monologue, and having a huge and impersonal battle royale would be a waste of the talent and skill that the players here show on a regular basis. I want to know how X feels about killing Y, their best friend, or Y, their worst enemy. It would mean more to me than how X feels about carving through nameless bodies to survive, and I doubt there would be as many volunteers for nameless bodies as there would for characters with potentially emotionally significant deaths, meaning you'd have to essentially assign deaths to players who want to have their characters survive. Past plots have shown that people are more willing to offer up their characters to die if they know that the deaths will have a personal impact. No one wants their character to be a faceless statistic...it negates everything they've done up until this point. We've worked hard, and put a lot of energy and emotion into this. Many of us really, truly care about this game, and I don't think it's overly demanding to suggest that we deserve better than a one-size-fits-all ending /bioware. I'm more than willing to do whatever's necessary to help.

I know I'm not a mod, but I've helped out in a minor way before by tagging the posts since the DW move and I'm willing to put in some extra time to make option B happen, if a major concern is that there won't be the manpower to co-ordinate. Considering that the game might lose a few characters in the interim, I'd like to know that the players of those characters got the best closure they could, and we all know that there's better closure for a character in being killed by a friend or enemy than dying as cannon-fodder for a stranger.

Option A seems to be an open invitation to OOC trouble in the whose-character-is-stronger sense, where option B seems to open the door to vastly-preferable IC conflict that would mostly be resolved among players themselves for the purpose of advancing CR or personal development in the next stage. I'd also venture to say that it would result in higher player retention come the Beta phase, and after spending months RPing with these people and watching these people RP, that's something I'd prioritize over anything else. I don't want to lose CR. I don't want others to lose CR. Preserving and advancing CR needs to be a central focus in what has the potential to be a difficult transition.