The complaints were quite the opposite, people were burning through content too quickly, and it didn't help that the new-ish content just straight up didn't work.
I spent nearly a month fiddling with LUA with a friend of mine to get some of the broken content working, but every new update from the Darkstar guys had some faggot going into the core and changing shit, nullifying specific functions entirely, requiring me to understand the core a bit more intimately (which is difficult, considering it's spaghetti code written by russians)
The issues with the server I was having was a combination of the code being garbbo, disagreements with certain perks being enabled, damage not being adjusted (or tracked right server-side) and a change in infrastructure I couldn't do much about.
After shit started getting real on my end, I dropped everything, I'd apologize some more, but I'm a huge faggot who can't sucking dicks
It was fun though, running through the stuff that worked.
One thing is for certain, when I decide to re-launch shit, I'm just gonna make a thread for suggestions, and write out all the requirements (that I can reasonable make) ahead of time.
Stuff like mats in the auction house beforehand, and other basic scripts to get around the broken content.
I think I'll just deploy a straight up dev-server to have people test and a more direct-line of contact, though I can't promise I'll be as active on account of a lot of shit going on, at least on my end.
Though, as usual, the more Darkstar fixes, the more shit gets broke, but it'd be nice to have a far more stable platform to fuck around on.
I think it's only for new accounts, but I think accounts that are under level works too. The one thing I hear though, is to not use the trial through steam, since it doesn't allow you to carry progress over, because Sqeenix is retarded.
My biggest concern right now is getting a physical server (specifically something beefy enough to run both FFXI private, and a PSO server I've been fiddling with)
Though I'd have to get something relatively beefy, running both linux and windows instances separately.
PSO (once I get that working at some point) Is relatively low maintenance, since most, if not all of the content works, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
As for getting the backups, I think it might be good to start fresh, on a slower-paced server. I don't know, I'd have to make a separate thread in the future to get everyone's thoughts.
Another thing I'd like a make is an actual Wiki with actual changes, and consistent instructions for installation, I did reach out to the guy who manages the manual updates, and he ended up fixing the broken one's he uploaded, which would speed up the installation process considerably.