#Content, Economy, and Population - Items that need to be addressed to be release ready

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copper stirrup
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Obviously things like performance/stability and finishing progression

Content:
Using a similar design to the "ore caves", create spawning explorable locations for players to partake in. The following for examples.

  1. Dungeons
  2. Creature Lair/Caves - rare creature spawns that take a group to kill and drop special loot/resources
  3. Shipwreck - Spawns over water tiles, once entered a timer starts till the ship "sinks". Players have until then to loot the place and get out alive
  4. Underwater dungeons/lairs - Spawns over water tiles. Entry looks like a small whirl pool. Works similar to dungeons.

Wonders - Not sure if they're in the game yet, but i think this will be super valuable to reward exploration. These natural wonders that give special resources

The above things will significantly help reward players for exploring and create some dynamic interest while roaming the world.

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Economy:

A big issue I'm starting to notice in the economy is that as the primary user base moves from each tier, demand and supply drops significantly for previous tiers. As a result, this is resulting in a shortage of previous tier materials. The people in my region seem to be mainly on tier 2. And there's quite a few profession where there is just a major shortage of tier 1 materials anywhere on the markets. I suspect this will continue with tier 3. This will cause issues with New Player Experience as time goes on. Say the game releases and then we fastforward 6 months. Any new players joining after that time may have a harder time progressing early on because those who have been playing awhile, they're not investing nearly as much time into harvesting and upkeeping previous tier materials. This may decrease retention rates among new players. Right now just looking at the markets and lack of people selling what I need in my region, I'm having to invest grinding quite a lot of professions. Originally I thought that past level 20 I was going to focus on a few, sell my wares, and buy what I need. But the either complete lack of items in the markets on my region or those that are selling are selling it for so much gold (and the time it would take to earn that gold is greater than the time it would take to grind out the professions), I'm finding myself grinding to 30 in 7-8 professions right now. The cause of this could be multiple reasons, but it is a worrying trend I'm noticing

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Population:

A worry i have is population spread. The world is large, very large. My worry is that players may spread themselves out too far, expecting a far greater overall population in the game. Based on the game's current size, I think maintaining a population peak of around 7k players minimum would be considered bare minimum for long term sustainment of this many regions. The scenario I'm worried about is the "death spiral" Now games decrease with population over time usually. Even some of the best games have seen this (Elden ring for example). So its normal. However, in games like mmorpgs it can cause issues as the content may be reliant on a specific population threshold. So in the case of a death spiral you'll have a chain of events like this. Game slowly decreasing population over time. Some of the regions weren't super populated to begin with. So when they lose players through the normal overall decline, the impact in thos regions is far greater because already they were low population. Those that remain start feeing the effects even greater. They're faced with an action, move to a new region. Some may get to this point and think "I really don't feel like starting over my settlement in a new region and going through that all again". So they then leave the game. This creates a series of compounding issues as that region now has a greater rate of decline, which then causes the above scenario to play out in a greater sense. Populations also have a huge impact on economies. Now of course its a balancing act because too many players in too confined a space can also have negative effects. So figuring out how to manage the very dynamic nature of gaming populations these days is going to be huge. I don't remember the character creation screen exactly, but when players are choosing a region to spawn in they should see a number on how many players are in that region. So they know what they're getting into