Dead before it even had a chance.
Hopefully whoever sent the cease and desist notice isn't doing so just to protect their IP; hopefully they actually want to make money off it. And if that's the case they'll either start their own server soon, or sell a license to let someone else do so.
Either way it won't be free, but it'd still be nice to have the game back.
Alternatively someone could instead go the EQ Emulator approach and "blindly" re-create the game's server software "from scratch" (although in such cases devs have been known to carefully/unofficially "peek" at the official source code to get details right) ... but then they'd be in the same quasi-legal state as P99, and whoever owns the rights might not be as forgiving as Daybreak.
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