If you're still checking the forums - there are some donation items, but aside from the new lower head gears, everything is normally resold in player shops (so nothing is donation-only; just have to get it from a player who is selling the item). Donations get turned into ad credits, which can be used or traded and sold among players. Hopefully we'll bring back our system to make this a safer and easier process in the near future, but keeping screenshots of trade logs and using them to report scams keeps things fairly safe. Voting for AnimusRO on the main site will also give you small amounts of ad credits each day.
WoE competition pretty much depends on which guild you join, and of course there is more action on some days than others. We are also in the process of trying to cut down the overpoweredness of some of our SQI items and discussing tweaking class balance, but it will take a few weeks of discussion before we see the changes. You may have already seen that MVP cards are pretty commonplace on this server.
I was told our customs were listed somewhere here, but there is also a list of some of our different customs at the bottom left of the Wiki panel:
http://animusro.wikispaces.com/If you have any feedback about whether or not you decide to stay, I think it would be great to share in the Feedback section of the forums so we can see what exact things are making new players either stay or leave. Thanks in advance, and welcome to the server.
Edit: Regarding your questions in Main chat a moment ago - we have one really large guild on the server, a few large/moderate-sized guilds, and then some smaller, more low-man guilds here and there. There are usually 3 or 4 guilds that juggle control of the castles. I play in a smaller guild, and so when we take a castle, we get rushed with a ton of people. Someone from Divinity or another larger guild will have to add their thoughts about action when holding a castle with a large guild, sorry.
