The biggest issue with “frontier” towns (aka not EF or WW) is two-fold - the location (and sometimes level requirements) make it so that less people are there, which makes it harder for the towns to complete upgrades (even if they have the money, there may not be enough people to continuously run townboards for upgrades), which makes people less likely to visit, which in turn exacerbates the problem. This means that unless the town has a huge guild pumping it, it can never really “catch up” to the main ones.
Here’s some simple suggestions to alleviate this issue:
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Town projects - refining and crafting should be separate categories, even if a town can still only work on one project at a time. Towns with lower tier benches get a boost on town project points. So for example, a town getting their first T5 bench gets double project points on the townboards. Then this goes down to 1.75x for their second T5, 1.5x for their third T5, 1.25x for their fourth T5, and finally regular points for their fifth T5. This doesn’t make town projects harder for other territories, but makes it easier for territories that are behind to “catch up”.
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Doing portals delays or lessens the intensity of an invasion (aka fewer waves). Invasions are inevitable, sure, but there should be some way for a less populous territory to stave off the inevitable downgrades. People don’t visit a town = don’t sign up = understaffed invasions or PUGs that don’t listen to orders/callouts. Also, this just makes IC sense, not even sure why it isn’t an ability already.
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T4 benches with 200 crafting skill can craft T5 up to 550gs, including consumables/ammo. Now maybe you can tweak this with the new crafting leveling, too (like each level unlocks more crafting on T4). Like, for example, we don’t want all T5 food to be available on a T4 bench. But certainly anything you can craft on a T5 camp. Certainly there’s no good reason why we can craft orichalcum arrows/bullets on a T4 bench. But there’s no reason I, as a skilled a renowned jewelcrafter/armorer/weaponsmith/whatever of the highest skill can’t craft a 530gs set of armor/weapons/accessories/etc for a new player without running all over the map. Keep the T5 benches for the highest level goods, sure. But let us craft the crappy stuff, please. This would also increase the viability of frontier towns.
However, there’s another factor I don’t see mentioned often as an issue with frontier towns: workbench layout. EF and WW have most of their workbenches in a small space, and it isn’t a trek to go between workbenches (MB, FL) and it isn’t a maze to get around either (WF, Ebon, Reek, Restless). Mourningdale and CK both have great layouts, and at least on my server, tend to be more populated with people’s third houses as a result.
However, I don’t think all towns should be redesigned! That’s boring. But let’s level the playing field a little bit. Let’s make it so that TP/Storage can be accessed anywhere within town (you could even make this a buff the town has to run on the townboards first). Even when some place like MB has T5 workbenches, I dread having to craft there simply because it’s a PITA to get around if I forget something. If you want to make unique layouts like Restless or Reek viable, you have to give them something, or else all the building/crafting buffs in the world are not going to matter.