It's really nothing like that.

The size of a playerbase does influence development somewhat, but it's not very extreme. Most of the time it's cutting some ideas because it wouldn't really work well with the size of the playerbase. Some things just don't scale up very well. Sometimes it's the way lag can effect the content. For example Crab chance had to be completely rescripted the hour before Destiny was released because while on the dev server it seemed fine when moved over to the main server the lag made it very easy to keep track of crabs, or sometimes they would teleport which ruined the game. Not only that, but lots of players want to play games like that, so you also have to implement an instancing system for minigames that will be useless in a few months when the hype dies down. Speaking of lag, that's the biggest problem. Releasing new content funnels players into the same area which stresses the server. What was supposed to be a nice release is tainted and stained by the poor experience players are getting. It sucks working months on content only to release it and get nothing but negative reaction because of lag, not because of content. That's something out of everyones control but Unixmad's.

Now on to the core problem: Classic's gameplay design and content. The problem, plain and simple, is that Classic's is not designed in a way that can be scaled up with simple additions. What I mean is for example, in an RPG if you want to reward a player with a new item there is so much to give them. Basically, RPG's have very big reward pools. There is so many options for what you can give a player. You can give them a sword, you can give them armor, or an accessory. But wait, that's only in the first dungeon... 50 levels later you can do the same thing! You can reward them with a better sword or better armor. So much variety for so little work, development wise. And players love it! New armor is only new graphics and a few new numbers plugged in. Same for any new item. And there's so much you can add... entire new armor sets, hundreds of sword varieties. If developing Classic was as easy as sitting down and creating sword graphics all day I promise you Classic would get plenty of updates. Even placing chests on Classic is a bit of a pain because what can we give the player? Gralats? That's fairly boring and simple. We can give things like bomb skins, or other cosmetic aspects because that's what Classic is all about. There are other options but I'll elaborate on those later.

And then we come to the actual content. Everything about an RPG/MMO is built on recycling as much as possible. A new town can be added in an RPG and on its own, content wise it's nothing... but add some characters, dialog and quests that are designed using an already existing questing system, sprinkle some shops and suddenly you have an entire town with purpose and content. Classic gets no such luxury. Destiny took a long time because every aspect of it had to be created from scratch, and nothing gets the benefit of simply relying on a system that already exists. Quests have to be designed from start to finish, to stand on their own. We have to design towns to the best of our ability to have purpose and reason to come back. Hence we try to design content that can be replayed... but that's time consuming to do. We have no quest system, so developing stuff like the crab chance took time. Creating the treasure map system took time. Creating the fireman quest took time. Creating the black market quest took time.

Speaking of Destiny, we had to create new baddies. RPGs/MMO have the benefit of taking simple gameplay and masking it with lots of choices. At its core mobs are pretty basic, some variety of either running at the player, or running away, or performing an action. It seems simple, and it is, but when you can kill these baddies with different skills, weapons, classes... it's hard to notice. Nearly every baddy on Classic needs to be created on its own. Lizardon's don't share the same behavior as anything else, neither do spiders or swamp soldiers. Every baddy needs its own behavior, which means scripting entire AI for each one, some more complex than others.

So simple AI is countered by a variety of skills and classes. The closest Classic gets to this is weapons, but we can't just add new items. Making a hammer is easy, making a boomerang is easy. In fact it's very fun to make that sort of content, I actually love doing stuff like that. I wish I could just sit and design new items, just like I would love to come up with new skills and spells. It honestly sounds really fun. It's the sort of content I like making the most for Classic, the rare times I actually get to. But say there is a hammer made... then what? We can release it as a reward for some quest but what would the player do with it? In an RPG, a new loot item, skill or spell can be used in combat, further giving the player more variety to gameplay that revolves heavily around progressing in one thing(combat). But in Classic using a hammer to kill baddies may add variety, but in the end there is no ultimate benefit. It could add variety to PvP as well, but that's more difficult to balance. PvP can range from one player attacking another on the overworld, to a group of players attacking and defending a fort, to a mob of 100 players blocking the entrance to a town. I can balance the use of a hammer against another player fairly easy... but it may negatively effect towering. One player using a hammer to slow down a player is predictable, but what if guild members find out they can time it right and completely lockdown an area surrounding the flag? Even then, not all players PvP so what bigger purpose will a hammer give players? I can sprinkle chests and rewards behind stakes for players to find but that goes back to the problem of no true reward system. Small reward pool = gaining an item that ultimately has little usage.

And that is where things really start to snowball. Releasing new items usually means releasing a new area that rewards the item, and then having an area that gives reason for the item. The hammer for example would probably be obtained in the gnome mines. That's one new area, creative with all the above problems in mind. Now you have the hammer and you want to use it, that means adding a new area that opens up with the hammer because in Classic/Zelda that is by far the best feeling when you get new items. It's not necessarily like that all the time, releasing a new item doesn't mean releasing two whole areas, but it can. This is why new items like the hammer and such aren't out yet. The hammer has been made, it just lacks a purpose. It would be nothing more than a draisine if we released it now... at least the draisine gets you around.

Oh, and one last thing. We can't even do dungeons Zelda-style because Classic is a multiplayer game. Why player a multiplayer game and force players to quest by themselves? Or you can design dungeons around multiple players but that's very complex. Do you design it for a fixed numbers, like say you need four players? Or do you try to allow puzzles and content that works with 2-4 players... but that's even more complicated. How can a puzzle work for two players but also four? To top it all off allowing players to complete dungeons together means adding a party system and an instancing system for the dungeons. Two things Classic does not have currently, which means more stuff being thrown onto an already full table. Then there's the lag, multiplayer dungeons means serverside baddies, serverside baddies mean lag. Imagine playing a game like Zelda when enemies lag and glitch around. And the time it would take to design a complex dungeon would be counter-productive to experience players would get. RPG's dungeons can be replayed over and over for the grinding/looting aspect, but again, little purpose in that for Classic. Time-trials maybe? Gralats perhaps? But a puzzle-based dungeon would get repetitive after being played a few times.

Yeah, Classic gets the benefit of being a "cosmetic" server but that's a blessing and a curse. Look at how many custom hats, bow skins, mounts, morphs Classic has. It's marked as "a pointless update" because they have no purpose but if this was an RPG server like Delteria, or a server like Era, we could slap a few numbers on those items and suddenly they would be much, much more useful. If a hat had an armor value, would players complain? I doubt it. But sadly that is not what Classic is. All the mounts and morphs that are made would be the equivalent to creating a new monster. Think of how many dungeons could be filled with the variety of morphs Classic has... but they're just cosmetic.

Sorry it's a bit of a TL;DR and a bit of a mess to digest but these are issues encountered when developing for Classic. It's unique, and I think that's a good thing, but it makes development much more difficult. I always wanted to do a sort of blog detailing the sort of work that goes into an update like Destiny, but I have a hard time organizing my thoughts into ways that would actually be pleasant to read. Also I'm not trying to belittle the work that goes into a server like Delteria, but I don't think it's fair at all to compare it to a server like Classic.