Having made a beta version available that implements all the PvP and zone changes the biggest body of work left seems to be making things classic. I found out the implementation of expansions in EQEmu is relatively new and there is an ongoing project to improve that so that classic servers are easy to create. I think I figured out how to reverse engineer most of P99 and TAKP by myself so that is the direction I'll go in now.
I'm tempted to create a real fork of EQEmu that both improves the ability to restrict by expansion and starts to include classic mechanics as easily chosen functionality based on expansion. There is a point though where I'd have to put in enough effort to gain community contribution and I'm not sure if I'm up for it.
If one could reach that critical mass I think you could outpace both of these projects in terms of "classicness" by virtue of being the only open source classic EQEmu project that provides both the EQEmu fork and classic database needed to achieve this. ProjectEQ not providing classic zone data is a big hole that is forcing so many people to create their own classic server. It's less important on the EQEmu side as functions are easy to change, piles of quest and spawn data where you don't know what the new values should be are not. Ideally this would involve rolling a new loginserver to fully fork the current EQEmu into a new community that has no reliance on them. The way the loginserver works today with pinned server categories it will always be difficult to gain legitimacy with players who see your servers are literally "beneath" a selection of other servers that is primarily just a certain group of developers of EQEmu.
You have to separate the concept of running an emulated server and that emulated server existing in the paradigm of loginserver control given to a few people. Not to mention they also control all your account logins and passwords and therefore if you were to make such a commitment as mentioned above you are at their mercy to not purge your server data making all players permanently lose access to their characters.
So do I have basically the willingness to fork EQEmu and make classic era available for everyone including classic data and then also build an open source community/bug report system and roll a new loginserver and account management interface? Probably not... but it'd be a lot cooler if I did. I could also try to contribute within the existing EQEmu project and such but it sounds like historically there was some fundamental differences in opinion about open sourcing classic era code and functionality with people like image feeling it should be open source. So that is a battle that already happened there. Sounds like it's put up or shut up time now with regards to a truly open classic EQ project. TAKP is promising to do this but if they're going to open source it then they should shit or get off the pot and a questionable amount of their functionality will be tied to their specific EQMac client that no one seems to like.
Plus there is the client problem looming over it all. That person who made openeq had the right idea it's another critical piece that basically HAS to happen. If I had a client I could provide people I'd pay for advertising to build a EQ PVP community by appealing to the larger PVP MMO community but since I can't provide the client you're always at the mercy of a tiny community of people and can't organically grow. With the level of effort mentioned with this client and the above you're looking at roughly a $1 million effort as a rough estimate if you paid for developers to implement everything. I'm just reflecting on the state of things in general. I don't like where EQemu is as a project but I certainly didn't put in the 20 years of work so I can't complain.
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