I aint readin allat

Firstly the town gets 7.5k cause you lose time and effort to babysit and entertain the new people that will almost always leave. You will be 200x better off just not doing it and instead just grind silver

And just so you know in the past member rank was unable to create a town till they ranked up and it had no real effect

Instead of trying to focus on magically trying to fix town gameplay for new people how about we get it fixed for older people first so it actually has usage and benefits. New player towns dont impact anything unless they block you either in expanding original town or steal a really good spot on the map

Recruiting new people is useless anyways it takes away a lot of time from you and forces you to be there always or they will get bored and quit. Unless there is somehow clear gameplay for them there is no reason to recruit people gameplay wise and yet server keeps enforcing it for claims and resources

You keep talking as if goal is playing on the server as solo player, making a town to "claim your base" and then pretending it is "geopol". If that is what was intended, fine, I guess I would understand your reasoning, but as long as I am convinced that intended function of towns is to resemble actual towns, I will keep considering the fact that everyone is solo an "issue" that needs fixing. You saying that "Recruiting new people is useless anyways" while being the only person in your town speaks volumes about what towns are right now.

Oh no, you got it all wrong

The actual "goal" ofc is to make towns feel like actual towns however that is unrealistic of a goal given to total playerbase compared to the total amount of towns. And no that does not mean less towns would fix it that just means that the spread of players is big (as said before, around 10 online people in the nation with 50ish towns is average for large nations. For towns is 2-3 players average). Instead the more realistic goal is to make what you consider "actual town gameplay" just into "actual nation gameplay". Basically the same thing just the scale is a bit larger. Aka in short, when there is not enough people to populate every town might as well make the gameplay into several people working together to construct a nation full of towns rather than a single town. And its always more fun and satisfactory to know that you build something massive like a whole nation with several towns compared to one medium town over a span of like a year or two

And just to clear it out again since the previous time I mentioned it might have been confusing, I did in fact do recruiting, a lot of it. I spent like a month or two just recruiting, entertaining new people and helping them with anything they need to play for as long as possible and gotten around 80 residents before I gave up. I specialize in data collection and research so I know when I say something is hopeless and meaningless that it is just that. The only exception is when you find residents on the same "skill level" as you, in that case you will "resonate" and click with eachother more and that might make them stay for longer. In the case of more "skilled" players, that factor is non existent

And lastly, reasons for recruiting:
- you may get a player that will be active for a long time
- you get more claims for your town
- you get better towny resources
- taxes if they start to earn money
- recruit bonus of 7.5k if they stay long enough

reasons against recruiting:
- you will spend several hours teaching each new resident things about the server and the town
- chances of them staying are not very high
- recruit bonus is not very good compared to the time invested
- you have high chances that new people will not be able to earn a lot of money
- if they do manage to stay active for long, high chance is that they wont be good in wars

Overall when you consider all these ups and downs the benefit of having them is negligible, you only lose a lot of time and effort for a bunch of kids that will get bored quite fast. It is not your job to care about servers playerbase and to entertain them when the server does not provide appropriate rewards and benefits or even tools to do so. Especially so if you are not a big fan of the staff team as a whole which a good amount of the players is not

Do note that in the time period where I was actually doing recruitment, I was in constantly in contact with zaify about aspects that would make it easier and more beneficial to do recruiting and there were changes that got applied in the process, quests and no point loss on first 5 deaths in wars being some of them. However no major game changing updates were made that would make recruiting good

In my opinion most of what you said is true but the reasoning is missing, and most likely the reasoning is, if a player is actually interested in server, they will be perfectly able to just make their own town and since nothing stops them, why not just go and do it, not like there are any downsides that they are aware of. And as for nations replacing what I mentioned for towns, that just does not do in my opinion, because the whole idea of having more people in one place is cooperation and that is impossible if 90% of the time you gonna be the only person around. Also I don't know the "average" players per town but 2-3 sounds wrong, like at any moment when server is at peak hours, you will have like 10 towns that have more than 1 player and everything else is just 1 player, so the "usual" amount of players per town is just 1.

Yes the whole idea is indeed to have multiple people being active in the same area however this is not 1.8 golden age of factions where we have 500+ people on the server. The map is big and there is not a lot of players compared to that so you will either have them spread around like it is rn or have 80% of the map empty

"but 2-3 sounds wrong" You are more than welcome to type "/t list by online" at multiple intervals of the day to see the top towns by online residents. I was doing that for a while so I do know it feels correct. We have more than 10 large nations on the server. There is hardly 100 players online at a time without sieges. Divide that by the nations. Each large nation has couple dozen towns. Divide people by that amount

Matter of fact, there is also a command now that will list all active residents in a town so you can go and do that for a bunch of other towns to see as well. Do also know that even if a person keeps logging on that they can just be some random kid doing absolutely nothing to benefit neither the town nor the nation. And hardly even themselves cause they dont know how to play

as of right now with 30 people online, there is only one town with 2 residents and the rest are all 1. When you type "/n list by online" it shows two nations with 3 people, some with 2 and the rest with 1 and that is just for top 10 nations so based on that and prior data I know for activity, large nations will most likely have around 10% of the current player amount

That doesnt quite have to be a bad thing. The gameplay doesnt need to require people being compacted together, they sure should work together but it doesnt have to be on a small scale. I do not see a single reason why gameplay should be kept small if we have a large map

by "doesnt need to require people being compacted together", I dont mean that you have to play solo 24/7, its just that you dont have to play as a team 24/7