"Tol Goldora started with 7 nobles and has 23 now."
And if Tol Goldora didn't exist where would those 23 nobles be? Would there still be realms below 15 nobles? Where would those nobles be, in the West making the island more spread out or in the east making the island more compact?
That’s a huge assumption to be making. I know many would have been in entirely different game worlds. Some would have gone dormant. Some would have probably done the bare minimum and just gold farmed for their other characters. As I’ve said before a realm of 20 minimally active players is far worse than one of ten highly active and invested players.
Besides what kind of reasoning is that? The founders of Tol Goldora built an interesting realm that a lot of people want to play in and that’s somehow a bad thing because all the other realms couldn’t keep the interest of their players? So the players who want to build and create things that other players want to participate in should be punished and all those players should be forced to settle for less compelling realms?
This is the same logic people were floating a while back that they should shut down Dwilight because it was the most popular game world! The Devs at the time actually thought that all the players of Dwilight would meekly immigrate to all the other worlds. The reality is I would have quit if they’d gotten rid of Dwilight and I think a lot of other players would have too. We didn’t choose Dwilight out of some abstract metric like player density we chose it because it appealed to us as a place where we could play interesting characters in a dynamic setting. We rejected continents like Atamara because we didn’t see the same potential there.
Thankfully at the time the Dev team saw logic and we ultimately kept Dwilight and got rid of Atamara. That’s the approach that should be taken to realms. Make it harder to hold onto the small, underpopulated flagging realms, don’t force people into them from well developed, thriving and compelling realms, and don’t make building such realms impossible.
The problem is you’re thinking of this only in terms of numbers: X Player Density/ Y total number of realms = healthy game and it just doesn’t work like that. This isn’t a game of numbers it’s a game of people. Forcing people into your idealized vision of a proper realm distribution won’t make the game better if you do it at the expense of human agency. Trust me I’m a social scientist I know a thing or two about how people work.
