Alright, so I've been casually playing this for the last couple of weeks. I think that the server is really great, the map is large, there's much custom stuff ontop of the regular tibia stuff. I'm currently level 210 without any kind of donations. The donations haven't affected me at all, since I chose to go with a non pvp char. I guess if you really want to be competitive and pvp you would absolutely need donations but this is a really old server, so you're not going to become highest level anytime soon and it lacks enough players to have decent wars so I really think that playing non pvp is the route to go. The only downside is that I play from europe and it's lagging even with WTFast/TibiaTunnel.
So I wouldn't let the donations scare you away from this server, if you're bored and wanna play some custom server I would suggest you to give this a try.