Hello. I don't make these types of posts often, but after seeing the difference between human nations and elven nations, I figured I should bring this up. The elves have 3 settlements, and two of them are primarily for an elven sub-race with a high population. It is incredibly easy to find RP in these nations given you log on at a good time. The people are active, and the population is dense. On the other hand, humans have an absurd number of settlements that I won't even try to count(a lot of them aren't even on the CT pillar list), and their population is spread thin across these. Despite this, we still have humans trying to build new settlements *cough* Reinmar *cough*. No hate to them(I play one of them), they just make a good example.
Wouldn't it be smarter to instead merge for the sake of RP? Or maybe staff can add a limit to the number of settlements per race? Another potential solution would be to create a public map that displays the locations of players in order to make finding RP easier, with an option to opt out of it if you don't want your location to be made public for the sake of avoiding metagamers.
We had this issue on a few other continents as well, and it only seems to be getting worse. The end of the pandemic is definitely a huge part of this, but 150 players is still a lot. There is no reason for you to have trouble finding people to RP with when 150 players are on the server. If we don't do anything to fix this, it will persist into the next continent as well. There's no point in waiting until then to fix these issues if doing so hasn't helped us in the past.
I just feel like making all of these human nations, most of which aren't even that different from one another, creates an unhealthy environment that makes it much harder to find RP. And even with different cultures, its always possible to have different communities within a nation/city. With the option to form new realms taken away, internal conflicts and coups would be encouraged. This might also help newer players who haven't yet joined a community. If you can't find RP after traveling to 6-7 cities, why would you stay on the server? Obviously this isn't exclusive to humans, but the issue is most evident with them.
Sorry for the rant. I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on this as well, whether they agree or disagree.