Unwillingly

I remember yesterday when I walked into Karosgrad with some random other halfling to try and peddle some cloth RP items I made and the entire city square was empty because everyone was off in the palace. Unless you were in the Haense discord you'd never know they were there and would probably assume Karosgrad is just a dead city.

Even active cities can feel dead if said cities are too large to scope out where people are with nametags.

This is why you make stuff small, folks.

This is a fairly based take but there's no feel of that "danger" of getting raided anymore, which leads us to not roleplay a guard force properly. It's not the days of the fringe and the first map, there's nobody that will guard the gate waiting for people. They're gonna obviously move where the action is and sometimes in a large town, it's in the back where a new player will sometimes, not explore.

Also, the towns have clearly expanded to contain all the people that come and go on LotC, which takes most of the action happening every day in the towns themselves. 

We could also expand on the fact that text roleplay takes a fairly obvious time to ask a simple question, and while some of you might be ready to help, there's always these high ego characters that would not even say anything to a "Where's the people ?".

So we should, ban raid times, ban large towns, ban text roleplay and move to voice obviously.

I completely agree. Cities need to be smaller. The issue is partly that everyone wants a massive house. I prime example of how to do it is Nevaehlen. They have a tiny city, with incredible well planning which works perfectly fine. 150x150 is enough. You just gotta plan properly. Then we'll centralise the map. Letting people choose their location so freely was a major fault of last map, and I must admit it was partly mine. People should have been forced to build closer together.