Part of the reason for lack of 'bumping into your neighbour' in Georgetown, is simply because user numbers are low at the moment - and we're working very hard on that.
I do believe that Georgetown has potential - in its current form - but really, we'd only be able to tell that once there are enough people on it for it to be 'busy' there.
Redesigning the town so that everything is centralised might bring more RP possibilities in the short-term, but it would almost certainly need 'putting back' once things got busy, or there will be mayhem once there are too many online at once. It is noticeable already that - even with quite moderate numbers - there are some 'player walking rat-runs' especially between the bank, the supermarket and the garage, which are becoming quite regular 'meeting spots' (whether the outcome is good or bad).
There is also the second factor, that has already been mentioned - a lot of new players need to grind a bit at first (which is becoming less grindy as we balance things, but there will always be a certain amount of 'work requirement' to reach those first plateaus of 'feeling safe, have a car, got some moolah behind me'. And necessarily, that work doesn't always mean traffic in Georgetown - until people reach that level of comfort where they feel they can swagger about a bit more in town, and feel 'normal' instead of hobo.
We'll continue to look at this, but in all honesty, don't expect the layout to change super-much, until we've actually made some decent player numbers.
One thing I *would* like to explore though, is some end-points for some of the gather/process chains that BRING people into Georgetown. That might be an easier route to making the place seem busier? For example, we could move the Jewellers into town, or add a second one? I also want there to be a gold-buyer who will buy the ill-gotten gains from the bank-jobs, and I want him to be right up front and centre in a busy city, so that the cops cannot just camp the roads in his local area and assume everyone visiting him will be a bank-robber with a bootful of gold. I do not wish to make gold bars anything other than illegal currency in Tanoa, and I want for bank robbers to always be shitting themselves while driving around with a carful of stolen gold. But I also want them to have a chance to store it in a garage until the heat dies down, and to be able to quietly and smartly plot to have it sold at the gold-buyer, right under the cops noses in the middle of town. I want the criminal to be able to hide in plain sight, and for the cops to be unable to find 'probable cause' to search him, simply because he is in a road that only leads to the gold-buyer. If it was the same road, or network of streets that led to the bank, the supermarket, the coffee-shop, and the garage, then Mister BankRobber has a much better chance of walking quite normally down the road, nipping secretly into the goldbuyers' office and getting away with it... but he will be pucker-factor twelve walking down the high-street with that much on him, for sure!
Stuff like this, I think, is going to be the sort of thing that makes Georgetown more like a bustling city - that, and bigger playerbase - which will come.
