Hi. That really depends on your choice of combat. With magic you can get away fairly low levels (tho higher = better, obviously). With melee tho you'll need quite high stats. Take a gander at the OP, I discuss some of this there.
Well that sucks. I can't really tell why either.
Emergency teleporting is a bit of a difficult one. Obviously the current emergency action is to eat/drink, and teleport if no food/potions are available. The risk of triggering a teleport instead of eating could cause very undesirable situations, too. The deaths could potentially be laggy servers / disconnections.