Uthgaard was one of the server's GMs up until a few months ago. He was basically the server police, dealing with everything negative and keeping people under control. He was a blunt, abrasive bastard which made it difficult to deal with him if you weren't one of the troublemakers yourself, but a blunt bastard was what the server needed, and he was the right guy to do it. You don't keep a bunch of asshole players under control with nice words. That's why he would be perfect for a PvP server. As far as I can tell, he quit because the head GMs refused to permaban the 365 players who were caught hacking a few months back, giving them a more lenient punishment instead because they didn't want to delete that many accounts.
As for this server, it'll be better than VZTZ. There'll be many more players, and the majority won't be from VZTZ which was a fairly small and insular server with a tight-knit (if volatile) community. They had a kind of hivemind and it was accepted and expected for people to behave in a certain way. With many more players who weren't part of that, this server will be different. There will still be a lot of dicks around, but they won't ruin the server unless the GMs neglect their duties and allow them to do so. The anti-hacking measures alone should prevent the biggest problem that VZTZ had. A good chunk of the VZTZ players won't stick around when it turns out leveling takes months and griefing is not met with unanimous praise and circlejerk high-fives. Some of the VZTZers can function fine in a more civilized environment and mostly enjoyed that server's atmosphere as a kind of hobby where they could get away with all kinds of shit. Others were unintelligent assclowns outside of the game too, so just make note of these (they're very recognizable) and ignore them.