I figure an response from an administrator is due at this point, so I'll interject some official opinions on here to hopefully clear things up.
Classic has, as previous noted, been losing players at an even faster rate than all the other playerworlds because of its lack of new content that the player can interact with (e.x., new quests, new weapons) and lack of replayable content. The server has also not been getting new players because of lack of quality content and highly undeveloped storyline.
There is a extrinsic balance we have to aim for when developing on the server to create new content and make sure all the content on the server is high-quality. This is because we can lose players if they aren't attracted in the first place because of low-quality content, and we can lose current players if there is no new content released.
After a good amount of content is released, a sort of safety net is formed where we have more time to improve on quality since there is more content already out there for the newer players to go through.
This safety net gives a false sense of security though because the general opinion is not as negative and the development team ends up doing something like rewriting the movement and ruining half of the content on the server.
The rest of the development team and I hope to reach the balance between quality and content and always keep in mind exactly where we are and not do anything to throw off that balance. This is at least what I have learned from the previous development teams and where they have broken down, and also from the success of certain other development teams before the NPC server.
Most of the storyline on Classic has already been thought out, and we are just attempting to strategically release the quests and still keep the quality up, while also trying to create replayable content such as bowling for the current players to entertain themselves with all with a very limited development team.
What I would really like everyone to do is let go of the grudges against the development team or any specific members of it, and instead try to guide us to hit this balance right on through opinion.
Thor and I have both been reading this thread and most of the posts have been helpful in doing so.
I would also like to remind everyone that we are always looking for potential new developers to help us out whether you specifically agree with our opinions or not:
http://classicgraal.net/applications/development/