I can't help thinking that what is happening to SoD looks like a typical case of Tunnel Vision (a term well known in IT project management, a short definition could be: a tendency to think only about one thing and to ignore everything else).
Staff may be working hard on fixing the gazillion bugs that came up with the 2.5 client, but we, as players, are getting desperate to see the basic functionalities of the game we love being fixed, this despair is mainly due to the near complete lack of information that is given to us (the last progress report on 2.5 is over 2 months old), so please bear in mind that regular status updates and clearly defined objectives are at least as important as results.
Five months have passed since the release of 2.5 client, and despite the promise of this new version, the one thing that was effectively reached is the loss, in a large proportion, of the end-game player base. As an officer of Seven Virtues, I struggle a bit more day after day to keep people motivated and logging in to raid the awesome content that was put in this game, I'm pretty sure that many others feel the same way.
I kindly ask SoD staff to indulge this post and to focus their efforts and communication on the real issues that brought the server population to an all-time low and this isn't, at the moment, the lack of new content but rather the difficulties we have to merely play with the existing content, the main ones being:
1) The groups/raids breaking every time a group leader goes link-dead and often breaking when any member of the raid goes link-dead and sometime breaking just by changing zones (we typically loose a solid hour each raid night just to form and reform to get a functional raid).
2) People being lagged out in crowded / AE heavy encounters thus rendering these people unable to do anything until they reload the game (hence breaking groups/raids), this issue seems related to the dysfunctional chat filters as in too much information being sent thus causing the client to loose sync with the server (does the eqclient.ini parameter: ServerFilter=1 works on SoD ?).
3) People having long (to very long) loading time or worse, crashing in a loop when trying to log in, especially in large outdoor zones like Tears of Elael, this doesn't affect everyone to the same extent but remains especially annoying since most of us are bound there.
4) Toons getting in game but being invisible to other, you can see them in zone with /who, they can use chats and get invited with /invite but they appear greyed out in group window and you cannot interact with them, the only way to fix it is to reload the client. Some people are never affected by this bug while for other it's almost systematic, this bug seems to be a regression from a previous patch as I don't recall it happening before the beginning of April.
5) Seemingly none working worn-effects such as vision, attack, charm focus, while this being difficult to quantify there seem to be an overall lack of melee dps, critical heals and spells compare to the 2.0 client.
6) The aggro bug, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about so I won't develop this one due to obvious reasons.
Last but not least, I would like to salute the enormous work that was done by SoD staff over the years, you guys created a fun and challenging Everquest server, please don't let its population decay because of lack of communication.
I'm available in game or through this forum to bring any help that I may, to test things or give details about the issues we encounter on a daily basis.
A fellow player.