have you played eve online? they have a fairly advanced economy one that makes anything done in other MMOs look like prison inmates trading cigarettes and favors with each other. if i were to redesign guilds and the economy, i would use eve as the model.. haha.
That said, and with regards to the initial post talking about no bots and group content only...
one of the fallacies that most of the new servers I see popup seem to have in their design mindset is "I will have 100s of people on my server right away!!!!". You might, but generally you will not; it takes time to earn the trust of the community and there are servers that have been around since the start that 95% of the people play on anyways so it is hard to define yourself differently enough to attract those stragglers who just don't quite like the "mainstream" server which has
1. better support than you can provide
2. 1000s of players visting on and off (most of the community)
3. multiple actual developers and GMs
How do you compete with that? Well the answer is NOT to simply try and make a server that simply has different rules in rules_values
youll need to think of a fantastic new story, possibly re-envision all of the zone connections (years of trees and sanctuary in the sky did this well)
youll need to not be thinking in terms of just copying the peqDB - try out some other servers, are they already doing what you are doing? Maybe you should join another project team that might only have one or two developers.
ive been hosting eqemu servers for people (for free) for years now and most developers seem to poof after ~4 months and then I never hear from them again and I can their servers after 6 months of inactivity (which i define as like 1 person checking it out every week). the successful projects require constant maintenance, the only way to get that is by having a team.
READ THIS IF if you suffered a TL
R moment.
You launch your server.
few people log in (this is normal). your content .. is it tuned for small trickles of people? if so then great they will stay, if not then they will leave.
If you absolutely must have raid and group content. scale it down in the db temporarily until you develop the 100s of players you are planning for, then slowly ramp up the difficulty in line with the population.