Dwarf fortress proves you can totally do things off script without player interaction. Poor Ragnar.
As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time.
If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.
Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.
Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.
Real cities have redundant opportunities. I live in a city of around 120k people. We have three Walmart's spread across the city and two Target stores. These are just the main big players obviously. There are dozens of smaller stores offering various goods. In game settings there tends to be one primary shop of a type per "area" forcing people to congregate around very specific places. Same with quest givers. There is zero reason for every warrior to have the exact same "warrior mentor/trainer". There could literally be dozens of different warrior trainers spread across the city and you're randomly assigned one of the lower utilization trainers on character creation. You get to know the local shops and resources around your particular trainer before branching out.
> They all end up in town. At the same time. ... Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time.
I hadn't thought about that. The perspective I am coming from (Runescape, Final Fantasy XIV) has players starting in one (or three) locations when they begin the game.
Thanks for the Ashes of Creation name-drop. I don't know if I'll play it but I'm definitely interested in watching the trajectory of this game.
As for the scale issue with criminality. You are describing exactly what happens when you put people on rails. They all end up in town. At the same time.
If a game cluster has a population of 200,000 players monthly - it should have the space for it. No instancing. No sharding (other than maybe regional boundaries). Don’t spawn everyone at the same starting point at the same time. Change it depending on their character creation choices, backstory, profession, etc. Let them naturally come to towns. Let there be enough land to support 200,000 inhabitants. These kinds of things I wish for. Space games are the only ones that manage to have enough room for everyone to live angrily ever after.
Ashes of Creation is trying its best in this area.
Land scarcity becomes a thing. Like in UO. You see what Eve has done, just let structures live so long as no one blows it up. In UO, they introduced decay timers so if you abandoned the game, you forfeit your lot. Games were smarter back then.