>>15428875
There are basic staples that every settlement needs to function. Among these are farmland, lumber, and mines. Without farms there is almost no cotton or garlic for healing and almost no crops for making filling meals. Hunting is slowed due to wound recovery and everything is slowed due to low stamina regen from hunger. Without lumber there are no houses, no fences, no guard towers, the list goes on. Without mines there is no good iron and without smiths to make it into quality tools, weapons, and armor it slows everyone's progress because of reduced speed and effectiveness.
So you have a minimum of 4 people doing incredibly basic tasks just to keep the town running on fumes, and god help you if one of them stops playing and doesn't log in. It would mean the people there have to do more work than before to make up the difference which means even less time for hunting to keep up in the fighting skill department.
Now extrapolate this across multiple small shitter settlements and you find you have multiple people doing the same exact tasks because it's a necessity, especially when the emphasis is on PvP and maintaining good fight skill and QL gear is needed to stay competitive. These people might want to do other things like brewing or build a colossus but they can't without risking their settlement to be vulnerable to attack as more time spent on vanity projects is less time spent preparing for war.
That's a worst-case scenario though and even on the previous server it wasn't that bad due to how far everyone was from each other, but because everyone was so ludicrously far PvP simply didn't happen which defeated the entire purpose of the server.