I don’t know if there’s any way to combat the herding instinct that players have.
We see it with the ‘trading server’, the ‘opening server’ during events, and when public fame training was a thing, the ‘train server’. Players gravitate to the largest/busiest location for efficiency, and for perception that they’re missing out on the best location.
Fewer servers than the one per region they’ve already cut it down to, I don’t think would make any difference to this, as even though a realm only needs about 10 players committed to doing the quests/killing the heroes, people were simply unwilling to start their own, I believe, because…
Big driving factors in every Rifts so far have been are incantations/WCs, and tombs, because the higher the population (in theory) the higher the chance of seeing these happen successfully/efficiently (necessary for Lifes/Marks/loot, also XP tho more WC than tomb). I wholeheartedly agree it didn’t seem a good move to have low inc drop rates. I too didn’t loot a single one directly FWIW, but the big c-USW realm from day 4 onwards almost every Castle went to WC. And fast/easy tombing is way better in largest possible group. So busy=best, almost always, for these reasons, and I don’t think that can be changed.
Yes, soloing felt super pointless & risky, when maxed I did a couple of skulls that I saw in the second realm, and we’re talking minutes rather than seconds. Hindered by HP scale from the 8 or so others players in the realm doing their own thing. Oh, the best was a pentaract that took, no exaggeration, 15+ minutes, due to lack of DPS, and escalating eyes making it feel like a Decaract. I gave up after about 5 mins as threat was too high, went back to the big realm, got in, did O1/O2 (or maybe there was no WC), went back and the dedicated souls were still trying to fight the same pentaract (definitely was the same one). Lol.
In some ways it benefits from effectively being a single realm/server, since it (for me) cuts out any nonsense of hopping around looking for things, and means notifiers can’t unduly affect it, but of course it’s bad in other ways, as you highlight. Though I think the cap actually is good to keep low, because if lets say 50 people are prepared to queue, it means the flood in when it opens takes it to ‘only’ 100/50 instead of 135/85, which seems to mean less lag.
(BTW: the 2x situations where you’d go in and find a “50”/50 realm is desolate are either everyone just flocked into a dungeon seconds ago causing momentary drop in player count due to loading screens, or everyone is at Oryx and the realm’s only minutes old, because it counts players there too. You can judge based on Heroes remain which it is, and stay or leave accordingly… if that helps for next time. The 37-realm you refer to looks like people went to a dungeon, so probs would be worth staying in.)
The whole thing with the queue feels a bit like train-era Realm, albeit with events & closing realms making it entirely less monotonous, in that once you’re in, you have to stay in, or you might as well read a book while you wait to get back in. Being willing to ignore loot was important, because leaving to vault something, or feed pet had to be really worthwhile. So for marks, this meant focusing only on one quest at a time, and redeeming/feeding after Oryx, not mid-realm, even sometimes dropping useful marks for pet food. Usually. Depending on if in it just for the quests, or the longer competition.
Last point, I’d asterisk your “have to get in early” criticism to a bit longer than the first couple of days, I found it okay starting on day 3 (the saturday, and being the weekend helped I’ve no doubt), though the general point holds true that they could have anticipated Cem would be a trouble spot following Skuld’s severe difficulty hike.