Essen by chance a friend of mine who was over working on some packet data and he mentioned something about a FFXI server written using LUA. Now I am not familiar with this language at all, but according to the source files it seems like an easier road than Erlang I would think. here is the link
https://forums.dspt.info I downloaded their source easy to compile and then it uses the basic db it installs etc for user management. Thought you might wanna take a look.