I agree the spawn killing, (While not against server rules, the idea we had was for these sorts of players to be ostracised and punished by the community ) has become a problem. We will be looking into a plugin to give players PvP immunity for an hour or so on first login (as R_o_n suggested)
Although with the new plans to create a proper spawn the problem will be eliminated altogether soon.
The staff of cataclysm would also like to apologise for the pro-longed and unexpected downtime earlier today, There was an unexplained problem with our server host as fatman has said (not sure how he even knows who our host is, good work lol).
As a side note, id like to say the main faction who has been spawn killing has been nuked to hell (admins are being blamed but from my knowledge they were wirelessly tracked while, Spawn killing (LOL). I wont release who the person was that done this but I personally happened to be watching from the sidelines during it.
Also, as for the grief of the initial spawn unfortunately there is no way to effectively protect against this without banning items and we refuse to do so unless a particular item is causing actual problems for the server. So for now, enjoy climbing your way out of a nuke hole like nothing you've ever seen before.
Thank you all for the kind words too by the way.
EDIT: Alo its great to hear we were at max capacity. If It keeps up the server slots will be upgraded.