My humble opinion is to separate game seasons for example:
Season 1 [without any client modifications (weapons & armors)]
Season 2 [ +Apella (Incl Recipes)]
Season 3 [ + Gold Weap with different SA (Incl Recipes)]
Season 4 [Dynasty Armors + Weapons]
Season 5 [Morai]
Season 6 [Vesper (Incl Vesper Noble)]
Season 7 [Vorpal]
Season 8 [Elegia]
Season 9 [Infinity] (Hero Weapons) and Cloaks
Season 10 [New Epic Jwl]
The gameplay will be nice but your project needs to provide also something unique for the players in order to leave behind that present gold style server. (im not talking about the crappy gameservers)
As you said
;)