I played on the EQEmulator servers during the summer of 2008-ish(?). I mostly played on Krusher's server just to run around the world like a god and check old zones out and bring back some memories. Making a character instantly max level and running around gets boring after a while so I gave it up and stopped playing EQEmu.
Summer 2009 I came back and decided to play on a slightly more legit server. I decided to play on the EZ Server (still incredibly fast) and I hit a Beastlord to level 53 in just a few hours. I realized that I was becoming bored again and thought to myself that maybe I had just grown out of EQ. I started skimming the EQEmulator boards and found Nilbog/Aeolwind's post about Project 1999 and proceeded to join up and start testing.
After about a week or two of screwing around and submitting minor bug reports I became bored of the testing process and decided to try and make more of a contribution to the server. I was considering playing a Necromancer on the server but I soon realized that research drops were completely terrible and it would be impossible to research your spells in the current state.
I ended up organizing and submitting my ideas for how to fix this issue and Nilbog gave me the green flag on my idea and told me if I submitted all the data to him that he would get it implemented. I spent like two weeks organizing everything and created tables within excel to show him which NPCs should drop which levels of research items (it was done in groups of leveled research, ie. 16, 20, 24, etc.).
Now that I know the process of how loots work (since I have done a large portion of the loot system on Project 1999) it would have been quite a task to do manually. I brought up the idea of overhauling all the loots across all the creatures using global lootdrop_id's and he seemed to like the idea. I don't think he wanted to do it himself (as he had enough on his plate) and he invited me to the team to do it myself.
I remember when the team was just: Nilbog, Aeolwind, Xzerion and myself. Our nightly max population for players was like 25 or 30 (with everyone multi-boxing). I remember trying to organized test raids in PoH and PoF and basically requiring everyone involved to play at least two characters because we didn't have a shot if we didn't.
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Oh how far we have come. Probably 15-20 people per night during prime time up the 900+ we are currently at.