Miths style of ranking was done through you submitting a "review" for your plot. If it was to the standard that the rank warranted then you would advance. And well its a mix, taking the pros of both the systems.
To clarify matters, at launch we will be 1.7.X - 1.8 client compatible. However, there will not be any 1.8 blocks. This is partly down to us not being convinced with the performance of the 1.8 block plugin used at MSE, but also down to us trying to provide a uniform experience, regardless of what you connect to Athion with. So what about Spigot 1.8 which launched today you ask? There is indeed an official 1.8 Spigot version available, but given there are several breaking changes in plugins caused by changes in the libraries it packages, we are holding off updating the server until we have evaluated all of our plugins. We will also take into consideration the state of client mods before dropping 1.7.X support. - flamin
Depends how much is broken But realistically, most of our plugins use only the Bukkit API, so shouldn't suffer too much. It'll mostly be fixing the portions of plugins that need to hook directly into the core of minecraft to provide more advanced functionality, then putting up a test server and checking everything is still operating as expected.