I second that. I found the progression on the last pack too fast. I connected by the first day, couldn't connect for a few days and when I came back everyone was insanely powerful.
I already talked about
Regrowth, which I played more and can say that the progression is quite slow. You cannot for example go from tierX material to tierX+2 material. You have to get the tierX+1 material beforehand to mine the tierX+2 material. In the last pack I found a lot of materials that were useless for my pickaxe.
And for resources, it's all or nothing. You begin with nothing, no ores, no redstone, no food. And as everything is based on crops, as soon as you got a resource you have infinite of it.
Actually, a quest based multiplayer Minecraft map wouldn't be too bad, right? Like blightfall, it includes multiple starting points, a large amount of options to go with starts off with the basis that the entire planet is literally covered with taint and you must survive from there.Of course it does have the limited lives thing so maybe not.
I looked for Blightfall and I think it was removed. But a similar themed pack was listed on FTB : Hubris. Taint everywhere and quests and mobs and dungeons and stuff.
And for the limited lives, if it's done by the Hardcore Questing Mode you can deactivate Hardcore mode (limited lives) or set the number of lives but keep the quests.