the only way to make other cities attractive is to make them good at something, which is connected with my other idea - the starting locations. While creating the character you should be given a question like 'what more or less would you like your character to be' and there are some options like 'policeman, medic, trader, gambler, prostitute, drug dealer' etc an each one of those archetypes is connected with one city eg gambling, prostitution - New Reno, trading - some town with a great amount of traders or a trading guild, trapper - klamath, medic - eg vault city, or some other town that will be specialized in medicine. Creating some guilds, hospitals and other places that will gather people from one profession where they can learn, buy some ingredients, gain some exp using their skills is a cool idea imho. What do we get with those few changes?
- poeple dont start in random locations - we know that you all will travel to ncr or first some other place to shovel your destiny
- people gather in other towns because they need to and want to, nowadays no one will go to klamath to trade his goods nor lets say san francisco because he knows that 90% of the population is in ncr/vc or killing themselves in some pvp locations. From now on a trader will know that if he wants to sell some medicine ingredients like fruits he needs to go to VC.