^ This is my concern. I'm not going to box a bunch of characters to play on a server. It's your server and you should do what you want with it, unfortunately it WILL alienate a lot of people because the content will be so hard that people can't progress. Having 30+ people on a legit server outside of one done REALLY REALLY well, well... it just isn't going to happen. And I am a glass half full kind of guy.
I did a classic server called Eq Revisted a while back. I completely overhauled the loot tables and added translocators for the main cities to help with some travel. You could solo with solo-able classes well and you could just about 2 box (which was limit) most of the content. The grind was still somewhat there as exp was 2x faster than normal, the drops had cool graphics and updated stats (for instance all cloth had +5hp +5mana, bronze +20hp +20mana, etc; dragoon dirk was 11/23 25hp 10dex) It also had lots of custom loot that was in line with my upgraded versions of old loot.
I loved my server. Thought it was balanced very well and offered the solo-2box content most people wanted. I had 8 people on at once during prime time. That was it. I eventually took it down during my bout with cancer, but the population grew almost to 0. Outside of P99 and some REALLY well done custom servers, the only servers that will hold a population for a little while is EZ type servers/random loot/quick leveling. The problem with them is if you don't continue to develop content for end game, the population for the front door is just as large for the back door.
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