Disclaimer: Excuse me if I don't voice my opinion about the 1.9 features directly. If you are only interested in those, skip my post.
This update, like any other update there was before it, will change things. It's natural that people make conclusions based on their assumptions or own testings, but a point many of you have realized is the following:
No one can predict how exactly the update is going to play out on MassiveCraft. Neither you players nor the tech-staff who make the plugins can make an elaborate assumption to how the mechanical changes will affect gameplay. We have seen updates come and have prepared ourselfs (and the plugins) for them, but we have learned over the past updates that doing big changes BEFORE an update has occurred is doing more harm than anything else.
What is likely to happen?
Out of experience, MassiveCraft will update to 1.9 as soon as the core server software is updated. Since 1.9 is a fairly big update, this will take time for the Spigot team and also for us, who have to adapt some minor things in our plugins that directly depend on minecraft rather than Spigot. A feature that poses direct harm to the server is likely to be disabled for a certain time (e.g: when withers were introduced, they were disabled because of their power) but I don't see one that is likely to be removed.
Then the new features will be on the server and all of us can let it sink, use it and after (preferably after a test phase) voice our opinions on the forums. The Team will then have to make a decision, based on evidence, logs and eventually pols. If it is necessary to make adaptions to some of our inhouse plugins, the tech-department will make the needed changes. But all this happens AFTER the update has taken place.
TL;DR: No one can say how it will work out, we will have to try it and it will be decided on what to do later.
