It's not the fault of the border realms that the player density on the island as a whole is so low. Thus, the fact that the current "solution" affects primarily these realms is, in my opinion, the main driver of player dissatisfaction. Zakky, it doesn't matter how many times you say it, forcing well populated realms to become refugees due to their historic location has not been a net-benefit to the player count in the past, and it certainly won't be if it comes to that now. This thread is 7 months old and the core issues are still there. How many more months or years of sitting in a chokepoint city will players have to go through before they can play Battlemaster again?
Again, it's NOT their fault that they like D'hara, or Madina, or wherever else. Forcing them to leave/move for an artificial reason (dev-set monster levels) is always going to be viewed poorly and drive frustration.
Trust me. Nobody dislikes this idea of hammering realms with monsters until people break. I can guarantee this will only piss people off and make them leave at the end, making monsters advance even farther due to lack of people. Region to noble ratio of 3 to 1? That is NOT achievable. People will constantly leave before we reach that point. We tell players to encourage other players to do certain tasks yet devs are forcing people to a certain direction. That to me is rather unfair. But something must be done to reduce the number of regions as there are too many per player at the moment and Madina, Fissoa, D'Hara and Luria are too far in the south to ever escape the fate of fighting monsters. If it was in my power, I would have just force relocated all these realms and took cities from realms with multiple cities. Like relocate Madina, D'Hara to Springdale and Mimer or Luria to Nifelheim. The current monster method doesn't happen over time. It gradually builds up as people expand more and more. It was manageable when players had 90 regions. Now it is very difficult because people decided to expand. Look at Avernus. They started to occupy former rogue regions. When one side of the map starts to become player controlled, some regions must be taken away. Since most large monsters live in the western lands, realms that border the western regions are suffering. To avoid this, players need to create more rogue regions. I am sure somebody explained this multiple times but since people do not want to do anything like this, monsters will continue to destroy realms until it becomes manageable again.
How would you convince D'Hara, Madina, Fissoa and Luria to relocate to somewhere closer to where the majority of realms currently are? Once D'Hara falls, Madina, Fissoa, and Luria will be crushed under the waves of monsters relatively quickly. I hope people are planning ahead because 80k CS moving together is not something you can stop that easily.
I am sorry but nobody has any amazing idea to resolve the player density issue. Most people probably want to be left alone and play the game like 3 years ago when you could expand without any problem. But the game was never designed to be won by players. Realms were never meant to be able to expand that large. Devs are trying to solve problems to extend its lifespan while players want to be left alone and play the game until it dies.
Good news is we have plateaued now so at least we are maintaining the same number of players for awhile. Now we just need people to somehow get more players to increase the density and that will spare all of us from this monster blight
