This following statement is a point of view from a player who has been around
a long time.

The slow decay of active higher level playerbase:
I guess some people stop playing because of the fact that if they dont know
right people or aren't in right societys they have hard time of seeing the
"end game" content that some more fortunate players see alot. The fact that
there are players who have seen a lot of that content is another issue in this
decaying playerbase, they have get bored of constant grinding of same monsters
over and over again. I find my self getting less and less motivated to do
anything because most of the basic monsters are so boring and the actual
effort needed to improve my character is ridiculous.
Another thing I've heard some people whining about is the fact that even if
some people are active and actually fairly competent players, some of the
eq-leaders/societys dont want anything to do with them, because they haven't
invested in boons, give me a break, boons shouldn't be the discriminating
factor in this point in any case, that's majorly flawed game design if it is.
I've heard suggestions that people would be able to get some boons if they was
in a certain level. Not too bad idea to go around this "If you dont have
boons, we dont want you bullshit.".
Amount of grinding to be able to do effective highlevel reincs. Why the level
costs/skill/spell costs have to be so high? I wouldn't mind seeing new faces
in the circle of "worthwhile" party members. Worthwhile in this case doesn't
necessarily mean that you have all the best gear and boons, it just means you
are active and willing to learn.

The amount of new players flowing into game and sticking around:
This is another major concern, if we dont have a steady flow of new players
and we keep losing older players with steady rate, this slowly becomes a
chatroom and a sandbox for a handfull of players that actually still enjoy the
grind. I guess we lack reasonable newbie/midbie content. Quests, areas and
other similar stuff that are planned for lower level players. This could offer
means to teach these new players thing or two about the game. Also I would
like to give a message to all newbie helpers out there, please, do talk with
the newbie you are trying to help and instead of offering the regular "reinc
to nomad ranger its best to start with", ask what they really want to do and
try to help them to get there.
I've talked about another idea that would help out newer players to explore
realm and some wizards told me it was a good one. This idea was not solely
mine, there was serious hangover brainstorm about it during the summer.
Anyways we came up with a possibility to get a module to laenor harbour/ferry
docks that would allow us to rent our excess ships to people who need them,
you could set up the prices and naturally a certain percent of the rental fees
would dissappear to accounts of maritime authority. This would allow newer and
older players rent ships for a certain amount of time and give them a
possibility to test drive these moneysinks.

To be continued in next post.