Majority of everyone are posting more or less the same thing about friendly staff and users, but also about plugins ... ive been running a successful server for a while now in Pure Vanilla and griefing is not something i find as a problem even when i run a Release version of MC, imho plugins are yes a help, but take away a lot of the creativity and cunning and thinking that can be used to hide an protect your base, but most of all PLUGINS are not always needed or required for a server to be "good"