To be quite honest, EQ2 was fine, long long long ago. The first error they made was to answer the call of soloers, in a mere attempt to not lose more ppl to WoW and to even try to grab some of WoW's players. That is when the game started to be much less enjoyable for me. Not that I dislike soloers, or that I think there shouldnt be solo content. But to me, the game was fine before that very day they made 80% of outdoors mobs soloable. Why did it ruin it for me ? Because you could tell from that very day that EQ2 would never be the same, and from LU to the next expansion to the next LU, they made the game dumber and dumber and dumber, to be as close as possible to their huge competitor, WoW. Every company has to adjust if they want to compete. SOE reversed everything just to try and make more profit. They claimed there wouldnt be any PVP. They HAD to implement it seeing as how it was popular on another game. There are changes that have to be made, but in honesty, who here thinks that the PvP system is original and NOT a copy of WoW's with a few changes ?
The game was easy at release. But it was still enjoyable. The pace of the game really changed over the course of a year and some months. I can level twice as fast as when the game came out with my alts, with the same amount of time. And Im not even grinding. I don't even want to think about how it would be if I would grind lol.
So how would I make EQ2 ? Much more like the game that came out on november 9, 2004, minus all the bugs and glitches :P...more of that and a lot less of WoW now. That is what made me quit the game.
But if I would have had something to say from the very start of the project ? More of EQ1, of course. There has been way too much EQ1 fans that have been really disappointed in EQ2. EQ2 has some cool features, I don't think its all crap, but it seems like for every nice thing they implement, they take 2 away. Of course its only my opinions, but I know are shared by, sadly, a lot of ppl (maybe not on these boards but hell...)
Still, have fun playing !