EQEmu which I'm playing has about 5,000 people on but the problem is it's spread across multiple servers and a lot of them are accounts boxing. I really don't want to play on p99 because I heard the people are awful but I hope they're nice to you!
Everyone's been nice so far, but I also haven't left the newb zone. Though, there are some druid rings and higher level characters passing through have been generous with bufs.