Comment by reactordev

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.