@Devs: The game is great, and even if you don't pay attention on my suggestion I want to thank you for this project!
As far as I know friendly NPCs are not planned for YO game. We will get some natives as enemies upon release, but not peasants for our own villages and/or any NPC villages on map.
Anyway I might have a couple of reasons to ask devs to reconsider (not sure they will, but I want to try
)1. MMO is under construction and as it stated in 'MMO' it will be Massive Multilayer. It means that we will have a lot of players on a single server. Enough to populate several big settlements for sure, but in YO map is rather small (and this part is not a subject to change as far as I know) and max player amount is only 64. It's barely enough to populate 2-3 villages, assuming that all 64 guys are active and willing to cooperate with each other, which leads us to the next, more serious issue:
2. Trolling. I don't think any of you can deny that trolls are a serious problem in this kind of game.
I run personal server for a couple of days and some of the guys that came to play at my server are constantly complaining about "Naked guys who jump on you, steal something and run away, they just leave the game after 1-2 hours and never returns".
Everyone knows that there should be PvP, but those guys makes it senseless. Killing for killing, and looting to piss you off.
So, let's say that some of 64 guys on your server will be trolls that came here 'for teh lulz', like 5 of 64... or 15 of 64, you know what I mean.
3. YO is standalone game, and have it's price. I doubt (I might be wrong) that people bought it just to get some bonuses in upcoming MMO. Personally, I don't really like MMOs, but I definitely like that kind of games like LiF:YO. But it's hard to get full game experience (like castle building and defending it against 10-30 guys) when you forced to play online with strangers - more likely that you (maybe with a couple of friends) will just live in woods in a small shack and will fight with naked guys, trying to steal something from ya.
So after a lot of words above what do I want to say:
This game should have some NPCs to populate your village (you've built with your friend or two). To work in workshops and to protect it, when you are offline. It's not unique: some other projects has the same system, NPCs are protecting what belongs to players.
It will allow people to play with well known friends and to experience every single feature of the game, even there is only two guys on the server.
If you read upon this point - thank you very much, you have a great patience
In the following post I will try to explain what kind of NPC system I'd like to see in game.