Granger wrote:
Pay2CatchUp - not convinced that this will motivate that many people to join an already running world.
Assuming Pay2CatchUp wasn't strictly speaking about buying subs for gold to mass buy everything, I don't see why it wouldn't be a great motivator to anyone remotely interested in coming back. I played since week 1 of World 10 and had to quit around 6 months in for quite some time. Even if the crop quality at cf isn't the super secret quality that botters are using, I don't think I would've had the motivation to start over in the quality race.
Granger wrote:
Apart from that: the community fair is also a wart of another problem, as it only exists as the one and only 'walmart' of the hearthlands as teleportation folds map locality into nothingness. That's nothing against the community fair, the guys that created it, ... (yada yada) - it's just the result of a mechanic that makes it effectively pointless to ever create another place should one market that functions already exist.
I agree with this to some extent. Markets obviously take a lot of maintenance and proper execution on many levels. Idk what happened to Samarqand, but if a market had good accessibility, safety, features like: not_a_cat's fair report, public kiln, anvil, etc, and maybe some currency conversion guide, I think people would surely be inclined to use it.