Familiarity. Same reason why P1999 is so hot and custom blue servers aren't.
Most of the potential players in the emulated everquest community just want to play the game they played 12 years ago. The devs don't want to because it's already been done and you can't really put your mark on a server that follows classic (aside from doing a bang-up job of emulating everything perfectly, which P1999 has apparently done). It's asking an artist to copy a famous painting instead of creating his own, so I feel your pain there.
I don't think.... a Really Custom Server, no matter how well designed, will ever have a high population here. It won't happen.
The players who have gone through the trouble of even getting EQEmu working are few enough and most are content to just play classic.
Now, MAYBE you could get completely new players interested in custom servers, but that's not a luxury we have here. If I tried to get somebody who never touched EQ to play any of this shit, they'd just laugh at me. I wrote an install guide for TZT that is like 58 steps, requires you to pirate a huge game via torrent, rename/edit a bunch of files, download a fix for dual core processors, download a spells file, make an eqemu forum account, etc. Plenty of former EQ'ers I've told about servers here have passed on playing simply because they got stuck on the install/setup process or ran into bugs.
Compare that to any F2P MMO which has at minimum WoW-quality graphics and usually a simple download/install process.
New blood is few and far in between for this community, and you're left with a bunch of nostalgia hounds.
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