I remember when they did it. Everyone could choose their hometown, but a vast majority picked Galadon because they wanted to be where the action was. After the restriction, the mud felt like a relative ghost town in short order, even with the same # of players. No more auctions, Arbiter got more boring, fewer conflicts...it changed the dynamics in a big way.

As far as Silent Tower, since when do they close areas when an author loses contact with the mud? Also, areas get changed or tweaked by the IMMs (not the authors) when they choose to, so I have a hard time believing they would just close a very popular area (as in many chars gladly con died trying to figure the place out) because they felt only the author could tweak it if it needed tweaking.

Hell and Silent were reasons some players kept rolling. Closing them for the reasons they gave just showed some skewed priorities.

I can't even recall all the times that changes were made because essentially the PB wasn't enjoying the mud the way an IMM thought they should be enjoying it, but one example was closing Hell.