The World: so Big so Beautiful... But yet so empty

[Dark-Saviour]

To make it feel alive they just need to make it more like a real breathing and living world. More NPCs that wander around, maybe have some in the forest looking at some fungus and talking about it, or NPCs from the city states going on a patrol to make the streets feel save. In the wild you could have a big amount of small critters and other small animals going on with their lives. Have the herbivore animals and monster be passive and in bigger herds. Use fates not to spawn some random monsters but spawn some carnivore that will attach the grazing herds of animals. So make it less "monsters everywhere that will kill you on sight" and more of a world where farmers and other people can survive. So no random spawning tree of death that will attack anything that walks on the street. This way you will have a landscape that does not look like a beautiful painting but like a beautiful and alive world.

And people will still not go there. It may be novel at first, but even the people that enjoy it will start to keep away over time, and most people will just flat out not care unless there's loot involved.

Give us riddles in the overworld (maybe each zone having at least one) that you need to find and solve or even jumping puzzles (but better thought out than the Kugane one). Yes people might look at the solution online but this is a decision by the players themselves.

Riddles are a great example of one-time-use content unless they have a writer change them up on a daily basis. Jumping puzzles too, to a lesser extent (unless you add dailies for them a la GW2 or gathering nodes at the end of them [expect rage]). The content would need to be truly dynamic to incentivize people to do it continue to do it on its own merit, and even then may need significant rewards to maintain interest.

I am still kinda surprised that a game that focuses so much on lore does not have some kind of way to gather it ingame. They could simply leave books at places with lore in it, that will unlock the description in a ingame lore section (thus no inventory space lost). They could even give us bookcases where we can store this in our house and click on it when we want to read them.

This should be a more prominent thing, even if I don't believe it would increase zone traffick. And done well. As in incomplete, in-depth, yet potentially tattered journals that FEEL like journals, and not in the GW2 style of "3-second overview of an entire reqion" or the BotW style of "Life's journal (that conveniently happens to only include events of my life relevant to you!)" We have a bit of this withe the notes left by Ser Yumeric's men, Edda's journal, etc. within the dungeons, but you'd expect places like the Sharlayan ruins to have a load of old documents lying around (granted, the Goblins might have picked them clean, but still).

Have random daily quests that are not shown on the map but that you have to find by looking all over the zone. It could be that you find a certain item that is marked when you get near it and that will give you a fetch quest. Or some monsters could be marked that will start a quest to kill a certain number of them. Again nothing ground breaking and no must do but at least a way to shake up all the fate farming in a zone and this could give people a way to level up other jobs after they have done all the normal side quests.

This is somewhat near an idea I had years ago, to make hunts into actual hunts. As in, rather than the monster just popping in a zone, you first start seeing signs of them, injured/dead NPCs on the road, spots of blood, trees knocked aside, scorch-marks on the ground, etc. You would then have to follow the destruction and lure out the monster. Kind of like how S-Ranks are now, but... less obtuse, and with a more sane way of knowing if they're actually available or not.
Unfortunately this would ultimately result in the 'Tedious' variant of encouraging zone participation in that after the first week; people would just stop caring about the journey pretty quick and want to kill the things again. And even during that time, most people would still just go, "I'll wait until someone calls it" rather than getting out there and looking for things... :-/