Topic: Population went up then sunk since patch - Reasons for low pop?
Imo one of the biggest faults of this game is how the game is made up of small islands, it really gives the game a kind of shallow feel to it.
I think this may be because when you have a fragmented game world, it's glaringly obviously how small the game is. When you have a large landmass it's not the same. There's also the problem that once on an island, if it's a pvp island, you can be easily trapped there. This ruins the game for everyone, even the alliances who think it's giving them some benefit - its not giving them benefit, because if there's hardly any players it will be a very boring game.
I envision a more fun world as maybe 1 or 2 giant landmasses, where there's no chokepoints, and enough freedom to move around that the solo player or small group can fit in without the need to be part of an alliance. There's supposed to be at least one advantage to being small, and that is that it's easier to hide - This is not the case in Perpetuum as it currently is.
I'll make a suggestion, but perhaps the gameworld should suffer from a massive tectonic shift and all the islands come together to form one giant landmass? That's how the lore could go behind it at least.
I can't think of one single mmorpg that is successful and has the land split up into little bottlenecked areas. I know you could try and say "well eve online is like that" but it's not - EVE has thousands of different zones, smaller than a perpetuum island no doubt, but EVE doesn't feel shallow because of it, there's just too much of a playable area in EVE for it to feel shallow (unless you played it hardcore for years).
You have a pvp game here where you've made it no fun for the average player to even try and compete. That could be a different story if the world was 1 giant landmass and without all the bottlenecks and ways to easily trap people.