#384 and #385 are functionally identical except for an internal version number increment, FYI. All the #385 build did was make it version 1.117 instead of version 1.116. #386 then officially began the transition into actual 1.6.x builds.
Unfortunately you're dealing with a bit of a Sophie's choice here due to the interactions at play. I can understand that. It's a complicated situation. I expect to hear a fair amount of rawr on this. It's unfortunately the nature of the beast, particularly given MCPC+'s mission of making disparate and often downright hostile APIs work together in tandem. Mod authors willing to adjust in that environment are the exception and not the rule. I think a lot of people didn't understand/don't remember that back in the 1.2.5 era, many mod authors had flat out delegated third parties to write the bukkit-compatible ports to their mods, and washed their hands of having to support those ports. When bukkit made it abundantly clear they have no interest in meeting the forge community anywhere near the middle, a lot of that got dropped in the aftermath, making the MCPC team's task Herculean when not downright Sisyphean. And that's where we're at now with a lot of these issues.
I remember back then and both sides blamed the other for saying they did not want to collaborate on designs. So as to the truth we probably will never know as none of us were in those discussions to see what was really said so we can't blame that on the Forge or Bukkit.
The one thing that is going to become an issue is when Bukkit becomes the official server jar, that is a question of when not if (unless Mojang wants to throw alot of money out the window). Vanilla Minecraft right now already has several classes for dealing with communication with Bukkit plugins and as the versions advance I except to see more and more integration. As that comes we also have Mojang's team that is supposely working on the Mod API (Minecon being the source of that info) and then a bit more heresay on that info is that the Bukkit team was asked to start work on it who already have a stable clean API for plugins (I will admit there is alot I can't do and even less now in recent updates with the changes to NMS) but what it does lack does help alot with stability. The day the MOD API will come out will probably not be until 1.8 at least unless all the teams decide to work on it instead of adding new features, but when it does if forge is not already collaborating with the team that is making it then I am guessing alot of mod authors are just going to quit due to the massive changes there is going to be. Now with the recent update to MCP/forge that allows for a deobfuscated run time is first step into making moding Minecraft not only easier but more compatible from version to version.
As for server owners running default server I can get about 20-30 players on and playing before server goes bellow 15TPS but with MCPC I can up near 100 players. It does not help alot of mods are not written to be used in mass scale at all which is partially what made TickThreading so much of a performance boost because it separated lots of the servers tasks (which where al in one thread) so that you could use multiple cores of you CPU and at the same time since none of the mods FTB uses (not 100% sure about this) are designed to be multi-threaded there was alot of issues with running TT at first but now for 1.4.7 has been mostly ironed out. So from an owners perspective what am I do to? If I run default server then I can only have about 25 people on at once which is I was funding the server via donations would be right on the line of not being able to fund itself, or do I swich to a program which works reasonably well so I can 4-5x the amount of people I have on. At the same time if I want to run a public server then what rules do I want to set. If I make it no griefing/stealing what will I use to protect it / log what people do? If I state that the server is no griefing then I am expected if it ever does happen to reprimand the person that did it (if it can even be found out) or prevent it in the first place which leads to using mods like MyTown which just switched authors. In some of the mod packs there is MFFS which is you use v2 is very good at protecting from explosions if you have the power while v3 (the UE version) is very good at preventing people from doing anything but has no real protection from tnt/nuke cannons), or You can give everyone a mystcraft age but then you have to deal with if they want to show it to someone and they person backstabs them etc. So do I whitelist my server then which will cause a dramatic reduction of the amount of people that play and ie funding for it. The other route which is what I have gone is made the server raid / grief / pvp allowed so I can deal with fixing mod bugs and watching for people who want to use fly/xray mods, but by doing that I use a considerable amount of the community because most people don't want to use their stuff but at the same time I don't have to deal with the constant Person A broke ___ rule.
Either way its a double edged sword for using alternative Server jars and extra mods but at the same time if noone did then alot of servers would not be able to support the communities they have behind them and personally I believe FTB and modded Minecraft in general would not be where it is today without them.
Also on that note I have had rather good success with tieing multiple servers together so I can just type a command to switch between them which allows for "multithreading" of servers but if something goes wrong I am my only source of help, but as I was talking about before its how you weigh the pros and cons as I can deal with Trading post not working (got permission to edit the mod server side so I might be able to fix that soon), and a few things just not always visually updating..
One thing I always have found ironic is that when 1.6 updated I was sitting on IRC in forge's channel when someone from forge dev team (don't think it was lex) asked if special source was updated to they could start working on forge for 1.6 and md_5 posted the link. What is the ironic part about that is md_5 makes special source but also makes Spigiot and is the 5th highest contributor to MCPC+, so the person forge was waiting for so they could start 1.6 development is also the person that makes the performance Bukkit server (Spigot).
Random note which is kinda neat to look at:
http://metrics.griefcraft.com/plugin/Spigot#Server+Software
(Spigot is what MCPC is built on and made by mostly the same people)[DOUBLEPOST=1377752592][/DOUBLEPOST]
I agree Vauthil,
While I haven't tested without MCPC yet and I don't blame the FTB team for any of the issues im having. I am very worried about what is going to happen if 1.1.4 rolls out with IC2 build #384, simply because of the amount of "feedback" you will hear from MCPC+ users.
My server actually thrived this month and has been slowly on the decline due to what appears to be "mystery block lag and rubber banding". Everything I test comes up good but the issue is still present.
Where MCPC has very good advantages which makes an admins life much easier. It always seems to be plauged with bugs, some of which are utterly gamebreaking and your up to the mercy of the MCPC team to try and fix it.
Like I said, i'll be testing without MCPC tonight and seeing what happens.
Did not see your post as I was writing my rather long post above. It might be that someone has an MFFS running as that can cause packet spam which can easily cause the issue your seeing also.