I hope everything works out. Just remember what happened in the Fringe with freebuild. Small towns were fine, but people had these HUGE castles that went inactive 2 days after they were built. Even the small towns cluttered lots of the land when they went inactive, but the community was much more open to new players.. When new players had freedom they could be creative, being a hermit is only interesting for so long, eventually the new players that will likely settle in the freebuild lands would find their place among nations and guilds respectively. So I'm hoping see that back in the community with this, at least. I was one of those hermits with a really small rp group long ago , then I found the Undead and the Monks after that. I like that nations are presented as hubs for rp, and that those are not freebuild. No matter how it goes, it is good that you are trying to make changes that will help the server.
As a new player, nations were really daunting. I didn't want to get involved with any of them until I had a good sense of what was going on in the server. I notice that lots of new players will end up joining the server and never end up playing again after they play for a few hours. At least in Vailor this problem has been larger than it was before in previous maps, I figure freebuild zones will give these players some kind of freedom to get started up in the world, I like this a lot.