Currently, hafen is facing the population decline. It is not among the faction members only. In fact, minor villages have much higher drop out rate: it is pointless to make warriors, since you will get wiped out by factions; crafter characters stop their active development after they reach 200 in stats (the rest is reachable by crafting sets). Basically, they loose the reason to play by reaching the available end-game content.
Meanwhile, building a warrior toon is a continuous process that encourages most of the food production process. If making a fighter character would be a must have for minor villages, more factions would emerge. Neighborhoods would have the tendency to ally and protect their surroundings.
Proposal:
There should be outer heaven grids with high quality animals that are 5 or more times harder to kill (higher hp is the key part) than the ones in the inner heaven. The outer heaven lands should be impossible to claim and build on as well (preventing all sorts of abuses with palisades). That way people will start gathering raid parties to actually go outside of their villages and spend time hunting hq stuff. PvE is quite bad in the game in terms of gathering groups for fighting them. It doesn't involve much risk, isn't that rewarding as it could and should be. We have been enjoying troll hunts only, since you never knew whether you would die next second.
Potential benefits:
- end-game content for the wider range of players. Giving a purpose for making warrior characters for minor villages.
- gathering parties formed by several villages in their neighborhoods and etc. That could lead to new forces being formed and less polarized world.
- enhancing trades and craft by making hq bones/intestines more accessible with proper effort.
- higher server population