So I was on the server for about 4 hours tonight playing in a makeshift party with damonmensch and alexlem56. My overall impression is pretty good. I was immediately impressed with the spawn area. It's very nicely designed and quite striking. Unfortunately, you spawn on the roof. Many people logged on, only to jump off the roof to their deaths. This happened throughout the time I was on. For the most part folks were polite but quiet, except when the lag set in and everyone was having trouble collecting blocks they mined. This caused much cursing (not by me) and I eventually signed off. I think the admins had gone to bed, so there was no one to do a quick server reset or whatever might fix things.
The world seemed fine--no particular complaints and nothing overly amazing in the terrain I saw. My party found a nice cave with an abandoned mineshaft and began to collect goods, build basic machinery, and start to get organized. The party chat system is okay--certainly not as good as a teamspeak channel--but it gets the job done. The permissions system wasn't one I was familiar with, so it was confusing at first. Even with just three of us, assigning permissions for each item (furnaces, chests, etc) was a pain. Something things also didn't seem to naturally have restrictions while others did. Why is a workbench always restricted? That doesn't make sense to me.
Also nonsensical is the "wilds," where you first spawn, which seem to be not too wild at all. It's a frozen wasteland. Better to spawn in a forest or desert or pretty much any other biome than snow. Snow's useless and this one was all but devoid of trees--especially those critical rubber trees.
It isn't clear how things will progress. Will we be able to easily mob farm? Protect our party from other players? Build our dream machines and homes? No idea. I'll be back on tomorrow to continue the adventure and see if I can get a better feel for things. Since I normally hang out as a builder on a creative adventure server (mc.bornemania.com)--this is a pretty radical departure for me and I want to give it the full measure of time before I decide whether it is a long-term home.
Hit me up in game if you want to try to join our little band of misfits.
