MGO beta 1st Impressions

It was a busy weekend for me with the CoD4 map pack launch, my Rock Band gig at Ghostboys place on Saturday and Sunday and GTA IV today but I squeezed in a little time for the MGO beta.
I had MGS: Subsistence but never got around to going online with it, as I was wrapped up with Socom III at the time. MGO shares one thing in common with Socom, they're both 3rd person shooters....and that's where the comparisons end. After the debacle that was creating a Konami ID + a game ID + down loading an update via P2P that took over 3 hrs I finally completed all the prerequisites, or so I thought. I started up the beta to discover another update that needed to be DL'd, fortunately this one took a fraction of the time as there were enought seeders on this time around!
So now all downloads and ID's were complete I entered the beta! First things first....make a player ID!!!???? OMG are you serious!? OK that done next was character profile creation time, this was cool, and there was enough variables to have plenty of unique players in MGO. Choose a head, there were about six to choose from, then body, you could customize your voice too. Gear was next, head, body, legs and foot wear. After you've created your avatar, you had to choose a weapon type to specialize in ie assault, sniper, shotgun, etc. Finally there was a list of special abilities to choose from, you had to pick four and those would level up much like any RPG as you played.
The lobby system was similar to Socom there were around five servers available to go into and within each were public and private rooms with one of two different game play types available, TDM or FFA. So far so good, I joined an open free for all room and it filled up fast, once the game launched you are prompted to choose a primary, secondary and grenade before going in.
At this point I was anxious to get my kill on...maybe I'm used to the speed of CoD4 but once I spawned in the game I felt like I was wading thru a swamp! The speed that the characters move at is way too slow, I played a few more games, tried the "man cannon" which was fun the first time, the maps are large and well designed but too many times I found myself trying to find someone to kill, the rounds were over before I ever fired a shot, this is most likely set by the host of the room. The mics were so low I ended up playing sans a headset, but I can see that with a team using headsets this game would play more tactically than Call of Duty 4. I really think the majority of people who will play MGO are diehard fans of the series. I am yet I really had a hard time enjoying this due to the super slow pace. I will need to play a bit more to see if MGO has host migration...a feature COD4 is sorely lacking!
The speed of MGO is a major downer for me, but I'll give it another try and report back