We played in beta and got hooked, but the release was harsh, took us ages to get copies of the game in the uk and then we could only play on us servers, eventually gave up. Went to give it another go a while later, think we got onto the free to play server about month before it closed down

 

On the database issue, it kind of depends on how many players your aiming to support, if you want 1000's of concurrent users then that would be a big problem, if you want a small server to support at most 100 players that's a lot easier. Either way you can always optimize later, getting a server running to support a handful of players would be a start that could be built from (the original WoW private servers could only handle a few players, now you have servers with 2k+ players on ).

 

I was using the 0.8 client as well, partly as I had the installer lying around still but also I don't think working around GameGuard would be a trivial problem I  made a really basic server in nodejs just to see the packets coming from the client and then have a go at guessing what the client wants in return. I got as far as getting the username/password and sending back a response that could trigger a particular error message (account locked, incorrect password, etc.) but the success response starts what I assume is encrypted mode or some sort of login puzzle as it sends a packet that's different each time and I can't figure out what it wants in return