Guild Wars 2

The basic idea is that ANET tracks some measure of how active a zone is. Periodically ANET looks at the total activity, zones which have more activity than the median have something tweaked to make them less desirable to farmers, zones with less than median activity become slightly more desirable. The tweaked values are displayed publicly so that players react quicker to the desirability shifts. The end result is that all zones have similar populations and the adjustment keeps increasing the tweaked value one cycle, decreasing it the next.
Until ANET does something to disrupt this equilibrium. But it’s a stable equilibrium, so it will restore itself in time.

The only questions are:
– What should be used to measure activity ?
– What gets tweaked ?
– How long should each cycle be ?

An added complication is that disrupting the Coin:Karma:XP ratio may mean players have trouble affording gear while they level a character.

For dungeons I’d suggest that the activity measure should be the number of times the dungeon gets completed (each path counts as a different dungeon) and the value that gets changed is your base Magic Find (gear and food are improvements to your base MF, so they will still work). This still risks the complication for characters that are leveling, so it’s not idea. But I don’t see many <80 characters running dungeons so it is acceptable until a better idea comes along.

For open world content I’d use dynamic events as the measure. Each person who gets a gold award for a DE counts as x points, a silver is y, a bronze is z. I’ll leave the exact value up to ANET. The thing that gets tweaked is a multiplier on the coin, karma and xp reward at the end of each dynamic event.