I see that some of the servers are getting great anti-grief security systems

Yes.

 

it's like this on pretty much any server i go to, the spawn has been completely stripped or trees and surface resources as well as looking like swiss cheese from everyone digging, it completely destroyed the first impression i got from the server. I do agree that spawn planets should be saved from strip mining and reserved for a main social hub where homes/cities could be built. If anything set player spawns to be on random planets so it allows for coal & ore gathering without problems, and have the coordinates for the main hub planet visible for everyone to go to.

 

Again, with almost no effort, a server admin can set it to where people are given methods to getting off the spawn planet, protection or otherwise. The tutorial quests can give coal rewards, the admins can litter chests all across the planet with coal or any other use of the human imagination. There are SO many easy ways to deal with not having the ability to mine coal off the starter world. Rawcritics gives people 200 coal right off the bat so if they don't want to sit on the spawn world and be unable to mine, cool. That's fine, take your 200 coal and go to another world or join the goofs standing at spawn talking to each other.

If an admin decides to run a dedicated server and puts enough effort into it that he uses a wrapper to protect spawn but can't be bothered to read up on how to add coal to the tutorial quest rewards, then who cares? It took me 5 minutes to read up on how to do that. If you're going to host a dedicated server and use spawn protection plugins, you need to be willing to put forth effort where it needs to be applied.

In short: if you protect spawn, offer methods to get coal so people can leave. Use tutorial quests for one.

 

This is probably the better option. Setting up the login so it plays like a regular sp or mp game, but also have a protected hub where people that just want to meet up can go.

 

The server I frequent simply keeps vending machines stocked full of coal at the beam-down point of the protected spawn planet. It works, as there's usually an admin on the planet socialising and they can nip over and restock.