Monster Hunter Tri Online First Impression

Ok, so I was gonna type up this post yesterday after all of my friends left... but oh big surprise there was a freakin power outage... So yeah sorry about today's post being late and all. Sorry if this post is a little short, the uhhh... thing I was planning on doing my post about came in the mail but they couldn't just leave it at my doorstep apparently so I have to pick it up at the post office since I wasn't home when it arrived and I had no other post ideas besides this. Anyway, I tried Monster Hunter Tri's online mode the other day, and allow me to tell you what I thought of it, or rather just my experience for my very first online playthrough. Well, it started off with a really long like 10 minute unskippable (or at least I'm pretty sure it was unskippable) cutscene showing off how apparently amazing the city is, then you pick a server... or wait... I think you pick a server first... well, it doesn't matter, since it was my first time online, I just picked a newbie server and decided to join a party that said "all welcome". The first thing I realised, well either due to my bad luck or maybe just the fact that it was a newbie server and the party I joined was just an "all welcome" party, was that I was the only one with a Wii Speak Mic... I was just like "am I the only one with a mic? Or do u guys just have em unplugged?" and I got no response so I said something like "I know you don't have mics plugged in but dammit I'm sure at least one of you can type a message" and still no response, so I just looked around the city, no teammates in sight and then I went to the "tavern" and started a quest by myself. I picked a level 1 mission where all you had to do was kill Jaggi or something but I realised that it took like 4 times the regular shots (yes I use a bowgun now if I never mentioned that before) to kill them and at first I didn't know why, but I think I actually know now... every enemy is probably alot stronger online since you are supposed to be fighting them with four players... so yeah going solo was a bad idea sort of... Oh also, I could have sworn that Tri was a pay to play game where it would cost you 500 Wii points (which is basically $5) for a month, but it didn't ask me to pay for anything so... yeah... maybe it's just like free for the first month or something... I don't know, but either way I still have that 500 Wii points card for pre-ordering the game so I'm set either way. Anyway, like I said sorry this post was a bit shorter then you guys are used to but I am seriously running out of ideas here.