EoE didn't even exist at the beginning, the server was wide open until then. There were a few large-to-huge pre-formed guilds that just didn't seem interested in raiding early on that certainly had the opportunity.
So done quickly (as I tab back and forth) here would be my way of doing it, in rough order of return for investment/likelyhood of happening:
-Open with Kunark (better zones - there simply isn't enough room for the surge of players because vanilla's mob population is extremely poorly distributed, this has been proven four times over now)
-Reduce 26 minute zone spawn timers to ~15 or less, in effect making zones "denser" and counteracting the general increase in class power / player density
-Allow TSS OOC regen because holy shit 20+ minute med times are dead, dead, dead and should stay that way. (plus its a class balance issue - think of the game as being tuned for TSS and work from there)
-Double the HP of pre-Velious raid bosses plus if possible some further tuning to make them relevant and interesting again (easier than de-tuning nearly two decades of class balance changes just to do undo it all later.)
-Find a better way to throttle XP than the awful xp cap you tried last time
-Instanced copies of all raid zones with no drop loot. Remove open-world versions because the CS staff to handle them no longer exists
-Whether or not to leave general zone pop in instanced versions untouched as a leveling alternative (over-population solution) is up for debate (no respawn?) but I'd lean towards no
Other randomness:
-Three month time lock worked fine, but voting turned out to be redundant and destructive (the one time a vote failed, the population was decimated. Without voting, there's no disappointment - everyone knows what the pace will be and what to plan for)
-You'll want to take the hell out of the hellish key camps for VP, VT and epics etc because you are going to have an unprecedented number of people trying to do them at once if you do the above. (multiple drops?)
-You may as well activate mercs with Luclin because that's when the majority of "groups" out in the world are boxers or frustrated people trying to find the one open spot in a boxed group. AA essentially destroys social grouping. We've seen it over and over. People try to blame instancing for something that actually occurs much earlier with the introduction of the endless XP grind.
And if this destroys your precious nostalgia, consider this: How much nostalgia do you get from two guys killing the first Nagafen on the server? How about one shaman solo breaking fear? Trakanon dying in 7 seconds?
It's a lot easier (in $$$) to take TSS as a starting point and rework from there, than trying to undo it all and add it back one expansion at a time.
Hrm, clearly, I like to babble on this subject. Apologies. None of the people who are only interested in the first 5% of EQ will agree with any of this, but it's fun watching them repeat the same shit that will never happen over and over.
