An interesting idea - my only concern would be that each player is effectively playing alone at the beginning, which would perhaps put a lot of new players off (not that that's a reason not to do it, just that it's something to keep in mind).
One possible variation would be to have a "flashback" option. Players would start in the past until they had reached "max level", but could also choose to flashback back to the past even once they had started play. So supposing you were in the present and you saw me connect, you could choose to flashback to the past and meet up with me. This would also allow players in the present to have histories together, even if they started playing at different times. To get around potential paradoxes I would suggest that both the past and present timelines are constantly moving along (ie the "flashback" moves you a fixed amount of time backwards - say 10 years - so that you can never go as far back as last time). If you wanted to be a bit flashy, you could even change the tense of text to reflect which timeline you're in - eg "KaVir grins and draws his sword" would be in the present, while in the flashback timeline you'd see "KaVir grinned and drew his sword".
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