I love the home street resource routes and have been a member of the bean route for quite a while, but I see a problem developing with them. The problem is that, to put it one way, there are too many members on the route list with too much resource on their streets. For example, two of the more popular routes, spice and bean, have over 50 members and many members have 10, 12, even 15 of the resource on their street.
Why is this a problem? Very simply, because, unless they go out of their way to do otherwise, everyone starts on the same street (the route manager's) and then follows the same sequence of streets, and with so many resources on the route few, I suspect, run the whole route. They get as much resource as they're after and then leave the route. Now this wouldn't really be a problem except that, with the new addition of glitchen receiving IMG when others use the resources on their streets, routes members get a real benefit from being visited. But I would guess the top half of people on the list get visited frequently while the lower people are visited less frequently (or never) because few people need so much resource that they take the time to run the whole route. So the glitchen on the top of the list are getting lots of IMG from visitors while those lower down are getting little. And the lower down people are the longer-term members who have been with the route from the start!
So what is the solution? Frankly I have no good ideas. What we need is a system that would spread the route visits roughly equally among all the members of the route. The only ways I can think of to implement this would require either major support from TS dev or major and constant tweaking of the route list and sign posts. Neither of these ideas seems workable. Does anyone have a good idea of how this could be resolved fairly easily???