The official word is that mages don't need wands. Therefore it doesn't matter if you can't find them. The wand system is designed for two types of people. One type is those who are content to snipe kills on weak characters, never fight a villager and only fight when they've engineered an ideal situation. The other is the type who think it's awesome spending hours re-exploring the same areas with every character searching for wands. If you're neither of those people, then mages aren't for you. That's what I've taken away from the whole issue. Don't play mages unless you want to play them as support or vulture types.

The updates are too new to really critique but honestly it's not much different from the old one. It's more tedious, but also more fair in terms of not giving characters locations they can't access rp-wise.