I had an idea today. What if... Your character tracked the last 100 exp hits you got for killing a npc , which zone you were in when this happened. And there was an exp bonus of +100% that every character had, that was diminished by 1% every time you kill a npc in the zone you are currently in. This would encourage people to go to new places just because of the bonus, then move as a group and migrate to new zones, instead of sitting in the same spot for hundreds of kills. Would effectively work to control the population in a zone.
An interesting idea, but it has holes. It assumes that a player might think that overall exp would be better if they moved zones. And if all things were equal, it certainly could. Especially if transportation to the second choice zone would not take very long. However, how many times have you had a great group who was grinding out exp with no complications for a long time, and something changed and all of a sudden the group went to . That awesome time you were having in zone1 might not carry over into zone2. For all you know zone2 could be a giant trainfest, or incredibly overcamped. You run back to your prior spot...but another group had moved in there since when they walked by, and there was no one there. I'm guessing that's happened to you a lot. Then there's the DB situation...If they liked the idea and tried to implement it, we all know it would be broken in some catastrophic way.
Aside from newbie zones at the launch of a server, and the 40-50 grind in original era (too few options)... due to the high progression populations all leveling in large numbers together (vs. the years it took back in the day to get most of a server 50+) load balancing encourages same-zone streamline play. Once you have Velious (and even if the next progression server launched at Velious --which I think it should) there are enough zones to spread out in. You'd need load balancing for the first few weeks in the newbie zones. You wouldn't need it elsewhere --though certain quest and key bottlenecks would be more toxic (so fix the bottlenecks properly for a high-pop 3 month era universe). But what about the 300 people wanting to use Unrest at the same time? Most of them would have to use other zones, making them viable for grouping play. However, if the people are happy to run 10X picks of the same 5 zones to level up... maybe there are other things to deal with first.
