Hey, I run UltimateEQ, so I can give you some perspective.
First and foremost, however, I will say that Imperium is a great server and I spent a good bit of time there, so definitely check it out.
UltimateEQ was created after I burned out on Imperium, Leetsauce, and AddictedDads. All the servers had great ideas, and I thought I could improve on many of them, while filling in a lot of gaps I felt were present. Thus the following was what I implemented to do so:
-The first phase of your time on UltimateEQ is spent killing mobs for "credits" which can be used to buy really nice gear in the Guild Lobby. Far better than you would ever get during normal progression. My hope with this was that it would impart a sense of power to the player, while still letting the nostalgia of Vanilla -> POP play out. While earning these credits you are also tasked with killing progression mobs, starting with some Vanilla bosses, and ending at some POP bosses (I've taken much of the drudgery out of the process). While doing this you will be able to upgrade a charm with better stats.
-The next phase starts after you complete the progression tasks. You enter the first "challenge" zone, which is technically also the first "Ultimate" zone, albeit a very small and focused one. The difficulty ramps up significantly starting here in order to prepare you for the Ultimate Zone progression. While doing this phase you will be rewarded with the ability to create Ultimate Weapons of various ranks (regular, excellent, superb, mastercraft...and eventually ultimate).
-After completing the first challenge zone you gain access to Ultimate Upper and Ultimate Lower Guk. In here you will find totally custom gear (rare and common boss drops as you would expect) with tons of clickies, custom augs, and other things. You can also get items necessary to craft your Ultimate Weapons here.
-Typically when folks have completed the Guk's they are working on or have completed their first Ultimate Weapon. They are now working on gambling to get better and better versions of their weapon until they hit Mastercraft. As you might expect, each version from regular -> Mastercraft has better stats, clickies, focus, and so on.
-The next phase is Ultimate Sebilis, which is similar to the Guk's, but introduces the first "Raid" mob, Ultimate Trakanon. Again, new gear, augs, and such drop here, but also the item necessary to make the best version of your Ultimate weapon. Aside from all the benefits of Ultimate Weapons, if you are a summoner-type class you get an Ultimate Pet, which will continually get upgraded, not only in power, but looks!
-You then move onto Ultimate Temple of Veeshan, which is the first Ultimate Raid zone. It's not necessarily a raid in the sense that you need a raid force, but it is a significant jump. In Ultimate Temple of Veeshan you can acquire a new set of armor with 4 tiers, very similar to Ultimate weapons. Gambling again plays a part in this process. You can also acquire new "Seals" which have special focus effects, which can also be faceted into gear and let you specialize your player further. Finally, if you beat Ultimate Vulak you can get a special Focus item which lets you specialize yourself even more, giving you more crit damage, or healing power, stronger Ultimate Pets, etc.
-One cool thing about this first round of Ultimate zones is that you can turn the gear you acquire into augments and then facet those augments in armor you have collected in Ultimate zones. So, for instance, if you get a piece of armor with Fade, or Turgurs, and so on, you can turn it into an augment and have a nice clicky effect on your armor.
-Anyways, from TOV you hit the first Infinite Ultimate Zone, Ultimate Kael Drakkel, which has 3 tiers and challenges players to beat each iteration in 60 minutes. Each tier is higher in difficulty, but also higher in reward. In here you can upgrade your TOV armor, Seals, and so on.
-From here you hit Ultimate Sleeper's Tomb, which is another Raid instance. Things get pretty crazy here in terms of customization. I added about 40 new spells in this zone alone, tons of new gear and weapon effects, and so on. One cool thing you can do in Ultimate Sleeper's Tomb is create "Avatar" items, which are essentially clickies that take other classes spells, and let other classes use them. Call it a mild multi-classing implementation not super dissimilar to Leetsauce.
-Alongside Ultimate Sleeper's Tomb I implemented the first Uber Boss event. Triggering this allows players to enter an open-world zone to tackle a very hard boss for really cool rewards.
-This pattern then continues through (more spells, more gear, continued focus upgrades, etc):
Ultimate Blackburrow
Ultimate Solusek A
Ultimate Mistmoore
Ultimate The Hole
Ultimate Tower of Frozen Shadow
-Today I am launching Ultimate Veeshan's Peak, which will be a challenge zone similar to Ultimate Kael Drakkel. I cannot divulge much about it because I like keeping surprises, but I've introduced some new stuff that will really turn the server on its head.
So, there is so much more I am sure I have missed. Epic 1.0 conversion, pet weapon vendors, guild banking, auto-skill learning, fast OOC regen, keeping track of fastest challenge zone clears, currency conversion, tons of visual clickies (nimbus, ornamentations, etc), and on and on.
The value here is that, based on how I have designed the server, I can create content fast. And that is not to say that the expedience comes at a price of quality, quite the opposite. I spend a great deal of time keeping classes in-line and thinking about spells/skills/items/events I create.
One last item I will mention since this has gone on awfully long - The community on the server is outstanding. I've never seen a group of people be generally cool to each other the way they do here. Make of that what you will!
Oh, and hopefully we will get Preferred status here soon!
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