I agree with you to some sense but to say that if I were to wish to start a lowrate it would instantly die is not a valid point to make. People like new fresh starts on something they Think will not go down as fast as the others servers do.Uhm, the problem with 7.4 servers is kinda complex - there's just a few things that need to be highlighted.
Not a single one of them will ever be stable just because of the amount of available servers to play popping one after another - you failed on one and gave up - no worries, there's another one starting in a week so people will hop on that one!
Besides, there's two 7.4 servers that stood the test of time and can be called stable - Tibiantis and Medivia. There's no point in making lowrate "long term" "serious" servers anymore because nobody will want to play them, considering that both of the servers i mentioned before have established a community that will keep playing due to stability and good decisions of hosters (although medivia royally fucked up with their "mainland rework" and "sprite rework", however it's still very enjoyable to play there, and Tibiantis is literally a 7.4 replica with undiscovered custom stuff and new content coming) Making another lowrate won't make people leave their respective OT's because of sunken cost fallacy, even if you manage to make it just as good or even better than the original (although that by itself is very difficult and close to impossible for 99% of hosters), also the fact that they both satisfy the needs of players that are willing to play long term: you want nostalgia feeling as if you're 10-12 years old again? - you go and play Tibiantis. you want something fresh with nice sprites and a lot of exp spots available with a lot of content to fill your time playing? theres Medivia.
Another point, the "dedot mentality". A lot of hosters in past years are to blame for that. They all allowed to use MC's, causing the online count to be insane in numbers - 900-1000 players being the average, while the actual humans playing on the server was close to 200-250. Vanilla Tbia 7.4 map can barely hold more than 200 ACTUAL HUMANS. When the online count showed "1000 players" (due to MC's) and in reality there was 200-250 humans playing, it caused the "dedot mentality" - now you see 300 players online and you think the server is dead because theres probably maybe 40-50 humans playing at best. That's why Tibiantis is often called a "dedot", because it has 160 online at peak, but due to ruthless MC policy and frequent bans for botters/rulebreakers, 160 online means that almost every spawn in the game is taken.
Honestly, the longevity of servers problem could be easily solved if MC's and botters were banned on every server as ruthlessly as they are on Tibiantis. That'd make even midrate servers way more difficult to play, thus allowing them to be active for longer .
Another problem is that most of the owners are very unoriginal and cannot create captivating custom content that would allow you to spend countless hours playing on the server to keep progressing into doing something. I believe Medivia's faction system is a fantastic example, even though it sometimes can be cancer - it is supposed to be cancer for a reason, it wants you to spent time on playing the game doing other things than just flat out running in circles and shooting gfbs/sds on target. Other servers just try to copy 8.x content and add it into 7.4 but it backfires horribly - those monsters/exp spots are not balanced on 7.4, thus it ruins the economy and allows players to skip tedious parts of levelling rather quickly.
Invalid melee/dist damage formulas, invalid shielding/armor formulas, invalid paralyze formulas, invalid healing/spell damage formulas/invalid loot percentages all cause the same thing - inherent imbalance. This problem is very persistent as @Adposatnr said and it is very frequently ommited and neglected, however I don't know the reason why that is. Most of the servers released now are made from OTLand available datapacks - while those datapacks are not at fault by themselves, because the people who release them often say that they're bug-ridden and formulas are invalid, owners just dont care at all to have accurate formulas. This causes creation of retarded myths like "paladin minimum damage" and "knights need a melee boost" that owners blindly agree to and make paladins/knights overpowered for example by allowing every bolt to hit and deal damage, making shielding/armor useless so that wearing equipment and upgrading it feels pointless (when it fact upgrading equipment should feel impactful because every 1 point of armor should mitigate 1 point of physical damage incoming regardless of the source), invalid shielding formulas cause 2h weapons usage to be negligible, invalid paralyze formula makes druids useless because original 7.4 druid paralyze was so strong it could literally kill someone if you had a team behind you, like on the gyazo here:
Gyazo (https://gyazo.com/396ebf5624f9b0a6234ed0f063062ba9)
Invalid loot percentages causes monsters that should be profitable to be worse than monsters that shouldn't be with the correct loot formulas. Because of that, gfbing tombs at level 30 seems to be a good idea because v shield and boh from necromancer drop insanely often on those plug-n-play servers, while camping BK or going through the trouble of making lootbags from halberds or plate armors generally seems like a retarded idea, while it should be the opposite. It makes the gameplay faster for no reason, because tombs are just too good on those servers and theres no incentive to do anything else other than GFBing tombs to death.
Another point i wanted to bring up - owners are usually very lax when it comes to banning botters. Botters roam around free because no one keeps an eye on them, characters that are runemakers get banned while the main char does not etc. - it's causing more and more people to be more acceptant of botting, even if it's only runemakers because "everyone does it".
Yet another point I recalled from my memory - servers generally have trash lore, meaning that they don't have any. On Medivia/Tibiantis there's a background to what's happening on the server, why it's happening and what should be done - most of boss monsters on Medivia have their names derived from Tibian history or NPC's lore, quests have their background, there's books on those quests etc, gracefully adding more RPG taste for the server. Can't speak for Tibiantis because none of the presented lore has been proven useful to solving certain parts of the custom quests, although it has been stated that the lore is closely tied with the general game world. Most of the owners ignore the lore and add spawns/quests that have literally no coverage in the existing books/npcs in the game, thus making it feel out of place and people are unable to immerse themselves in the RPG content provided, sadly.
All the problems on 7.4 servers generally tend to stem from owner's lack of will to improve and pure laziness and greed, however players are to blame as well for supporting and nurturing these kinds of behaviours from owners.
I am using hexedited sources from cip files which would make the damage pretty close to perfect.
Well I do not agree with you that you should use existing lores and stuff like that, why not come up with something yourself, to write 2-3 maybe even 4-5 books of lores in tibia for maybe lets say 3 quests that has something together would not be difficult and would also be more original, and to state what you said about exp and loot bags, boostin gold drop was never a problem and people would still do lootbags on some previous servers ive worked with which were lowrated. Everything is about the karisma and state of the owner.
Paralyze would be for sure as you showed on this gif - a strong rune for druids to use.
Botters - instant deletion even if its Toor himself or Punio the pvpgod?