Cities are Empty - So Put in MORE NPCs

Phantax

Once you get into VR levels and certainly more-so the higher VR levels almost all the cities you go into are like ghost towns. You may see a few players occasionally but that's rare, normally its just one or two !
My alliance is Dominion (which apparently is the highest populated) so this empty feel must be even worse for players from the other alliances.

So my suggestion is more NPCs in the cites.(this obviously is in addition to the existing NPCs in shops/stalls/guards etc)
Now I'm not saying fill the cities with hundreds of NPCs, but an additional 20/25 of them just walking around, shopping, standing by a fountain, whatever would greatly add to the feel of a city being alive and vibrant. And yes I'm going to use the 'I' word again it would make it feel more immersive ! These NPCs are non-interactive (apart from the usual Hello/Greetings) and just go about their business regardless.

Now obviously we don't want the Cities/Towns to be overrun by NPC should for some reason there suddenly be dozens of players in that city. The answer to that is to phase the amount of NPC that are present. Simply phase the number of NPCs depending on how many players are with the city.
Less that 5 players = all the NPCs, 5-10 players = 15 NPCs, 10-15 players = 10 NPCs, 20-25 players = 5 NPCs and more than 25 players = no extra NPCs

Doing this we would always have a nice balance of entities in a city and for those players that don't have uber gaming rigs it wouldn't heavily burden their systems.

Zenimax went to such effort to make these great looking cities and its all wasted if they continually seem deserted !

fromtesonlineb16_ESO

The 'fix' to this is for ZOS to make the post-50 game attractive to the large numbers of players who you're seeing pre-50, not hide the fact it's largely a failure in that respect by stuffing NPCs all other the place.

Phantax

fromtesonlineb16_ESO wrote: »

The 'fix' to this is for ZOS to make the post-50 game attractive to the large numbers of players who you're seeing pre-50, not hide the fact it's largely a failure in that respect by stuffing NPCs all other the place.

That's all very well but don't forget that pre-50 you are all in one alliance area. Once you reach VR the players are spread over areas 3 timed greater and all players will have a home city they tend to go to regardless of which one/where it is.

( Zenimax could remove any sort of alliance phasing so we also see all players in a city regardless of their faction? )

And lets face it, once Imperial City and Wrothgar are in the game this 'empty' city feel is going to be even worse !

jamie.goddenrwb17_ESO

This is actually a pretty cool idea. If it could be done fairly simply without negatively affecting performance etc, I can see it being a nice touch even if the end goal is to populate with a player majority.