This says a lot about the "confilict of interest" that may occur between a new server and the player community, leaving no happy medium between John Doe
server dev and Jack-B-Nimble solo player. If one is putting an effort into the preferences of the public player base when developing a server, it's difficult to
even think about knowing what players do enjoy. When you look at all those (unsuccessful) "What are you looking for?" threads with maybe 10 replies out of
several hundred players, it leaves John Doe guessing at what he thinks may be a cool idea. It's not like you can rely on the polls for this campaign. Just roll
the dice and see what happens. The intentions and/or goals of John Doe wanting other players on his server, I guess, would vary. Some people would be
content with a small handful of players, while others may only be out to win a popularity contest, in which I advise people like that to see Shania, because,
"That don't impress-ah-me much" I don't think any less, or any more of a server that sits there with 0-5 players, than a server with 500 players. I would
actually respect and admire someone who would leave their server up with 0 population for a few years. It's not like you just opened a corner store, threw
up an open sign, and if no customers show up, you had to close the doors. It may be a different story when a server dev puts himself in a position with costs
incurred and relies on donations from players to help out, but I'm sure both the players and server owner are aware of the high risks of things going sour on
either end. On the bright side, having a 0-5 player count, a solo dev is not going to get "burnt out" running the server.

I believe the biggest problem with servers in general, and I am guilty of this as well, are they are opened to quickly to the public and the devs change there original vision in order to please this current player base.

My advice for any up and coming server devs is to create a great foundation, go with your original vision and create enough content to keep players busy for at least 6 months before you even think of opening. Once you think you are ready invite a few people in for closed beta testing, once you get those kinks worked out, do an open beta test, track everyones account that participated then do a clean wipe of the characters table's and give out beta rewards upon your official launch.

As long as you are up front with all of this people will not get bent out of shape for losing a character, they just need to know going in that it is going to happen.

Far as the single player/group argument, well you can null that easily if you just take the time to learn more advanced perl/lua scripting. Allot can be done via scripting to keep things challenging for a solo player without inflating stats, hp, ac, min dmg, max dmg etc etc. If you want examples id be glad to share some of my work, just pm me here and ill give you my skype info.

You can also script in auto scaling and different sub events based on player count with perl/lua. It isn't that difficult, just take the time to actually learn and lean on these guy s around here like natedog or kinglykrab. You can learn how to do allot of unique encounters if you just take the time to learn.

Pretty much this. Too many servers open up with "few customized zones" and "Adjusted XP rates" and people run out of things to do within 2 weeks.

Very few servers have that "VISION" worked up from ground up.

I dot loots