I'll start thinking about how to do this.
At the moment, you can kind of use -connect. You can use -connect to make it connect to local computers on your LAN, like -connect=192.168.0.100. If you start it out blank and don't let it connect to the main network, the difficulty is still at the original low difficulty. If you've port-forwarded though, then outside nodes might still connect inward to you.
With -connect it still uses IRC, do you think it shouldn't get on IRC when you're telling it to only connect to specific nodes with -connect? The main scenario for -connect is where you have a server farm, with two connected to the network and the rest connected to the first two. In that case, you wouldn't want the -connect computers on IRC.
void ThreadIRCSeed(void* parg)
{
if (mapArgs.count("-connect"))
return;