Cities are empty (especialy North and periferies). Fact. But there was a time, they were populated. Fact. What cause this problem and possible ways of solution.
A) Causes:
1) Limited number of players on server. Watch statistic
http://rookie.name/fonline/ 2) Traveling on worldmap is slower than previous ages.
a) you can use car, but not everyone has car. Even if you have one, there is not any safe place to park in wasteland and your only solution is to create tent ad hoc (it is bad for players who does not use alts)
b) you can use train, but trains are not visible from start to everyone, waiting for next train in wished direction is too long, trains are connecting only few cities (but i like traveling by this way, you can meet new people and it is cheap and fast (WHY THERE IS NOT TRAIN STATION NEAR HINK.. ehm, HUB?
)).
3) There is nothing to do in Northern cities, except few not repeteably quest related tasks (and PVP)
And nobody needs to mine/craft today.
4) There are PKillers.
(oh, sorry, i forget, there are not any PKs.. Why? Because there are not players visiting north cities. Of course, you can find few of them, but the days you were afraid to go there because of PKs are gone).
Solutions:
A) populate cities by citizens that would live in unused city buildings, so instead of tent(base) - wasteland - city - wasteland - tent(base) circle, there will exist city -wasteland - city circle.
In each unguarded city should exist possibility tu buy (permanently) house that will replace tent. Player who wants to life there should have a very high local reputation, so he will first work on reputation (contrary to PvP and PK players, who wants first level 21 char and enough weapons and stuff). I hope, there could exist communities and this could be a great background for future roleplay activity. Sure, there have to exist some rules to avoid PK among theese citizens, but maybe zero regulation among them, with no karma loss will cause the same effect like in TLA server (people starts care then, if they have to).
Q: But somebody who will start later will not have a chance to join this..
A: Look at current situation, there are not dozens of new players who want to live in those citeis.. and there are a lot of cities and a lot of unused buildings there. Also, after one month of inactivity of that house will delete his cizizenship.
Q: But this could be exploitable.
A: Who cares. Nobody is visiting North cities (except powerfull PvP gangs), so who cares. And we are betatesting.
B) Reward players by visiting Northern cities.
a) enable caravans from guarded cities (NCR, HUB, SF) to unguarded. People should be able to join them, if they have at least any armor and weapon.
b) caravans should meet raiders like in normal encounters and players should be able to loot stuff from those dead enemies
c) after they reach unguared city, caravan should wait for cca 10-15 minutes after arrive, so players could go to city, sell looted stuff to local NPC traders, buy some, do some (un)repeatable quests, chat with other caravaniers and then join caravan traveling back to start city
d) only after arrive to city, where caravan started (NCR -> Klamath ->
NCR), players would be paid for their services (distance, number of killed raiders,...)
e) exploiting: caravans should kick you over the unguarded city to protec you against waiting PKs, if you stay near caravan, they should guard you very well, no possible PK your caravan teamates, ....
