The world is composed of a central main island, and others islands around.
All people spam or can be born only on the central island, no personal bind fire can be made on exotic land.
The main idear is you cant make any claim (personal, village) in the other islands.
And of course you can only get low/mid quality stuff in the main island.
Or salt, pearl, etc only are in the surounding islands.
And you cant put an ofline gatherer, when you log on and your toon was in a foreing isle, he can only log in at his main fire or at randomplace in central continent.
All rock under deap ocean are "to hard to mine, so you cant tunelling to the exotic quality metal, or go there without a risk of battle on the see pirate style.