To my understanding (and from what I've personally seen) the server operates on a system wherein the longer it has been since mobs in an area have been murdered, the stronger that mob becomes. If the rats in the sewers aren't regularly killed, they increase in population until they spill out onto the streets. If the road between Vallaki is regularly cleared, it's actually a fairly peaceful trip. If it's left on its own, it becomes increasingly dangerous.
This is one of my favorite things about PotM, because it lends a sense of reality to the world and helps encourage people to venture out into less popular areas more if they intend to adventuring and the like. I've even had more heroic characters who actually went out of their way to patrol some of these areas just to "keep the roads safe" or the like. It's a very cool setup.
On the other hand, I wonder if it couldn't be tweaked a bit?
I'm writing this during a server reset. It'd been a few days since the server has reset and I'd actually been admiring how cool it was that some of the areas had built up. I had to sneak to Midway from the Outskirts during the night cycle and there were so many wolves. It was the first time in ages I'd actually been intimidated by the spawns in that area. About half an hour later, I was idling around the Fishing Lodge and a pack of Worg jumped me. Normally, they don't even venture to the road.. but the spawn in the area must've been high enough that they went patrolling (another really cool AI behavior.) Eventually, we got a group together and decided to deal with the pirate cave.. and it was glorious. There were actually monsters to fight and stuff to do and... then the reset.
The rub with the server reset is that also resets the spawns. Granted, at some random starting place.. but it completely loses the continuity that makes the growing-threat-from-spawns thing neat. Exacerbating the matter, it seems like the server resets about once a day, or once every other day.
Is it possible to make spawn levels persistent across resets? To pick up where they left off? It'd do wonders to execute the actual intention of the thing. If not, how would people feel about increasing the rates at which spawns grow to help compensate for the frequency of our server resets?
Just a thought.
Edit: Making a point to state that my preference in the above suggestion is having persistent spawn levels across resets, so that people actually have to clear them before they would go down. Increasing the rate at which spawn levels increase is a secondary thought if the former were mechanically impossible or unnecessarily difficult.
