Be prepared for a few things though:

1. Death can be crippling. You lose 15% or so of your exp when you die, and then you're a ghost for about 2 minutes, unable to move or interact (you can talk and that's it). In that time, you'd better hope you get someone to resurrect you, or else you lose another 15%. There are ways around this, like Autolife in Priest, but they're hard to set up, have cooldowns and...yeah, death sucks, let's just leave it at that. And you will die. A lot. Especially when you don't know what you're doing.
2. As someone with a level 100 char, I can tell you that the grind is very, very real. It starts nice and fast. The first forty levels or so, especially if you do missions, are great fun. But then there comes this point where a mission wants you to kill 300 of a given monster, or an area wants you to kill 100 of a monster but there are only 12-16 per repop, etc. And at that point you're going to probably find yourself slumming (fighting in lower-level areas to kill mobs that are weak for faster and less risky AP gains). I can clearly remember the level 50-60 range was basically a blur of fighting in level 30-45 areas, I had a circuit ai'd grind because missions were all finished at the time. They're improving that, and that's cool, but yeah.
3. After literally five years and more saying they wanted to make Qinfo not a big deal, it's...still a big deal. Instead of just releasing the info and saying "we'll make missions later", it's still taboo to talk about boss strats on quests, much less how to even get there. There's a little Qinfo guide floating around someplace that probably everybody and their brother knows and uses.
4. This game is fast. If you're using a screenreader, it can be very difficult to keep up with certain boss battles. For this reason, I often found myself being overlevelled when I fought bosses because if I didn't, I'd cue the wrong command and die. I wasn't able to simultaneously read output and make input, even with good aliases (aliases are a must). Triggers probably are too, but it's not easy to figure that out. This is not a MUD for the faint of heart. And remember, fast combat+heavey death penalty = ouchie.

So it's a good MUD. There's a lot going for it. But there are some things I wish every newbie knew before getting involved, in order to decide whether or not they wanted to deal with it. I don't think I'll ever play seriously again until or unless they consider a) softening their death penalty or slowing the secondary ghost counter, B) either slowing combat or making certain mid-level bosses a bit easier, C) just forgetting the whole Qinfo thing as I think the whole mindset is just generally clannish and toxic, or D) balance the jobs (they're working hard on this, so I'll give props where they're due). If some or all those things are fixed, then we'll see. right now, though, I sorta feel like I've done what I came to do and now I only check back when an interesting new job or something comes in.

If you're a cyborg, stuff unlocks by level, so level matters for those. Also, most missions also unlock by level, and levels give you stat points and, consequently, let you access better gear/better stuff. Levels are the way you progress. So if you get approximately 12-16k exp per monster, and you need 40 mil exp to level, and you lose 12 mil from dying? Yeah, that's a big hail no in my book.
that said, I'm not too fond of Alter's deaths either. You can lose a crapton of exp that way, and skill proficiencies can go back up pretty quick but it still bites. I'm just glad this isn't a game where you leave your corpse behind; usually when I find that on a MUD, I ask myself what the point is. I mean, surely if you went to a place and got your ass kicked, going back there to get your corpse is...ahem, kind of likely to get your ass kicked again, no?
Anyway, UossMud gets around that part by making the mob that killed you non-aggro when that happens. Or you can pay gold to have it summoned to the church if you want, say if you aggro'd a whole room. You can also just quit, wait a couple of minutes and come back, and that'll probably reset the aggro anyway.
So no, I'm afraid I'm not buying the whole "death is a blessing in disguise" thing.

And regarding combat speed? Go kill Magus at level 60 and tell me how well your sound pack does there.
Heck, the version of the sound pack I downloaded looked like a mess, and a lot of abilities didn't make sounds at all (animist, I'm looking at you). It felt nowhere near as complete as MushZ, so eventually I stopped using it.

@5 have someone drag you around the moon or some high level place where the monsters dont use aoe attacks. No xp caps means you can gain a stupidly large amount of xp. Trickers give 1000000 exp per kill, plus there are ap and xp egg accessories that double each respectively.

Try running militia every day. You'll get millions for a successful run at the higher levels.

I was doing the dungeon for a while, and that's how I grinded.  I should get back into that, I think I still have the sound pack, wonder if they've updated it.

The last update that I know was logged was around December last year, so yeah the pack still gets updates. The link in the first post is the latest one, again as far as I'm aware. The cool thing with raids, is that you can practice them as many times as you need to get a feel for them. You're probably typically not doing them alone either, so you coordinate who's covering what, among other things. When you die on them, you lose 0 xp so you can keep going back. I'm still pretty new to the game, but I'm finding more and more cool stuff each day.

I intensely dislike that mission. It clarifies that you're trying to get to the other end of the road, so you have to kill everything on the road. Fine. Except there are only like 32 mobs, and you kill them all, and the road's empty...and you need 80 total. It's the first, and not the last, of its kind, I'm afraid. I mean, it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but definitely rather annoying. When game logic doesn't add up, in my eyes at least.

I do count it against Uossmud, because I'm not saying it's only a problem here. I'm saying it's a problem in most MUDs, the same way the corpse mechanic is. The same way the overlap of skills in Diku makes it feel really, really boring (go run Aardwolf for a month and get a t7 character, see how many pointless (read, identical) spells and skills you learn.
So yes, it's one point against UossMud, but it's not exclusive by any means. It's just that if you're going to use story to justify killing, and then you kill everything, that should be the end of the mission, roughly. If it was like 70 mobs on the road and you need to kill 80, fine; you're unlikely to kill them all before repop anyway. But when you need to kill two full repops and then some? Nah, it doesn't suit.

Comparatively speaking though, AA is a lot kinder.
It's easy to die if you end up in the wrong spot, that's true, but for your first three islands that's extremely hard to do. Even then, unless you're backstabbed or whatnot, it's very difficult to die in less than twenty seconds (you're likely able to flee). While in UossMud, if you find the wrong boss/prepare badly/get in over your head because this room happened to be set up so that all mobs aggro when you attack the first, you can die very, very quickly. And then if no one's around, that's 30% exp lost, and since a lot of stuff relies on level in this game, that can be a kick in the face. On AA you might be able to lose a few million exp if you're really unlucky; in UossMud, you can literally go below your exp to level, so if you die while at 4% of a level you can lose 30% exp and end up needing like 128% exp to level up. AA never does this; if you die with little exp on AA, you aren't put into negatives. Oh also, AA at least has resurrection, you don't leave your corpse behind, and getting skill improvements is not particularly hard.
The only part I agree with here is that AA will dent areas that are commonly run. I've never much liked that aspect of things, and it's one area where UossMud does it right; if I want to grind Zozo over and over, let me bloody well do it if I think it's safe.

I was discussing this MUD with a few friends last night actually...and one thing came up, related to MU* in general, or MUD even.

Why exactly is it taboo for qinfo exactly? Okay, I get story spoilers, but I've run into situations where (and I'm paraphrasing from discord here) people can't report genuine bugs becaus that'd be divulging quest information. I've run into it myself, on occasion I've tried to report broken quests only to get hit on a few MU* that have the you cannot talk about *anything* quest related rule, even if it's to tell the wizzes how things are broken.

I'd rather see that rule dropped across MU* The worst offender is a MU* I won't name, where they state you cannot discuss quests either on or away from game, and if you do, to report people who do that. So. Wait. They want me to snitch on people, they want me to....snitch on people away from the game for discussing quest things? Hold on, I'm not okay with that. Sure, on the game, have a rule that says okay, you can't discuss X info about quests, but away from the game, the wizzes have zero control over anything

/rant over

Honestly after playing Uossmud, it makes me wish alter's bosses were even half as varied. I think my biggest problem is figuring out consistent ways to level outside raids. I'm currently level 40. I've been doing all the missions I can, but also in the middle of trying to train a bunch of jobs because I'm only just now realising the potential of having a diverse character on that game. I'm seeing people get to level 100 in a week maybe a little more and wondering how on earth they're doing it.