Some may not be high levels, just good at what they do, and some may be level 14+ wizards buffing a dual-kama wielding monk to hunt shadows. (Yes I saw you both, ruined my shadow xp grind DX)
Each person will have their own reasons, like "I cant do brothel so I do spider cave instead of roaming fields for a single grass spider nest that maybe sometimes appears" or "I'll kill sixty constructs I know are there rather than one of the four hags that may already be farmed out" or "why kill myself on firestorming ghosts when I can kill child vampires under Raduta, or go to tergs and get both teeth and bone golem skulls."
The only reason to pick the harder options are "loot and XP" which doesn't fly well with roleplayers, who will pick the easier option because it makes sense, and for those with too much loot, combat capped XP, or already hit the dungeon recently so cant get good loot for another couple weeks if they open the chest (ninjalooting or flagging scripts or otherwise), the incentive to "stay" away is lost.
It's not necessarily their fault. If it's quicker to do it themselves than hire people who could get themselves killed and never return with the resources while one waits for them why would one wait? And if they hunt for them as well as buy what was collected when they were offline, that's even quicker still.
There are some natural behaviours that result in both the low and high level populace that sets people on their own paths and preference, and there is a unique dynamic to it. Some may hate it, and are vocal, most ignore it and play anyway, the rest take every advantage that makes sense IC and OOC.
In my own opinion, the roleplay change promotes high end merchants with their high end stock to want to stick around in Vallaki. They get rewarded for sticking around and they're closer to players that can grind for it, since they don't enjoy MC RP and its rare they can offsell their goods in high player times there unless they have really expensive things for MC goers.
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Personally I feel bad with my lv 10 when I go back to (west) Barovia to look for herbs or roleplay with friends because there is content I can do east of it with people. I have my own issues with people not buying potions when I do market them, so I dont get the funds to buy herbs, so I have to go look for them myself and offload the potion weight off to members of my player faction.
Maybe level 10 is too high or too low for west Barovia, I don't know. There's still content I *can* do there but whether I should is a question that is debated between people that think I'm too high to be there and people that think I'm too low to travel with them and I'm just caught in the precarious middle just doing what I can do.