Node population concern
I have a little concern about how the node citizenship system might end up as.
And I'd like to confirm it here, not due to some ill will but in hopes that it's unwarranted or already taken care of.
From the materials already out it seems to me that players will naturally gravitate towards the "strongest" nodes while leaving "weak" nodes behind. After all noone will be willing to purchase a node housing in a node that's regularly raided, especially if they decided to master in gathering or processing profession. And noone will stick to that node unless forced to, but I hope there is no forcefull node assignment, cause that would simply divide player population to bullies and bullied. And raise playerbase anxiety, which is never good for a game.
From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be a citizen limit intended for a node, something about higher taxes in overpopulated nodes if I understand right. I also get it that resource and dungeon/mob distribution among the nodes paired with fast travel restrictions should encourage players to populate different nodes but after all what's the point of staying where the resources are if they just get stolen every 20/30 days (higher lvl nodes won't likely be as easy to raid) and your appartment/house gets destroyed .
The same applies, if your node of choice becomes a vassal node. What's the point in staying in the subservent node if you can move to a higher level one.
It looks like after some initial back and forth, appearance of metropolises might be actually quite fast. People will figure out where the biggest bullies are and join their nodes for peace of mind and resource security.
I'm also not sure if governor of a higher level node can revoke vassal status from a lower level node in the ZOI of his node and just raid that node for resources. But if that option exist, there will always be some people who will mess with others just for shits and giggles with no regard for profit or reason.
I know the game was made with high risk - high reward philosophy in mind, but so far it looks like staying in low level nodes is only high risk and no reward. So people will move, leaving quite a bit of the map empty.
As I said, this is a concern, and I am self aware enough to know, it might be groundless and maybe things will work out just fine.
If they won't tho, I have a little suggestion. Not for the vanilla game maybe but for some expansion/development in the future: Free Nodes - governed by NPC, level 3-5 nodes with no vassals, built around a certain world feature and excluded from node wars, where people can get citizenship if they are tired of losing their shit all the time after fullfilling some condition, preferably related to the world feature the node is related to (quest or achievement level in the exploration/raiding of the feature) with citizen limits either set or regulated if needed.
And by world feature I mean a certain localised quality the node will have. For instance a coastal Free Node would be placed near ingame variation of Mariana Trench, which could be either a specialised dungeon or exploration spot with unique resources obtainable there. Some more examples would be a volcano, ancient corrupted forrest, Ancient's abandoned stronghold and so on.They can fit into the reclamation theme of the game as some sort of forward expedition bases established in cruicial areas by all rases consensus.
Unique resources would need to be trasported to participating people's nodes by caravans - stimulating the world pvp a bit, while residents of the node could focus on equipment tailored towards exploring the world feature.
Of course permanent safety of such node should come at the cost of lower level services, bonuses and higher scarsity of materials other than those from world feature (and some other demerrits if needed).
This is an idea to accomodate people with less time/drive/enthusiasm and keep them in the game rather than make them quit in frustration.
