Not sure if this is different now or not. But reducing the ores from 2 to 1 and just making cutting logs take longer would be an easy fix. Could also be applied to fishing etc...
Almost nobody mines/woodcuts for money, it's really not a problem at all. If we want fishing to be better, we just need people to eat more food, which could easily be done by getting more people to pk and making bosses more appealing. (topic regarding bossing
here). It's not skilling supplies that are a problem; it's things like gear.
Though this isn't as severe of a problem as it's claimed to be; a better solution to cut the amount of supplies that come into the game through gathering is to provide alternate training methods. For both mining and woodcutting the best high level training methods put supplies into the game, if we were to introduce choking ivy and something similar for mining that would just provide good exp people looking to just gain exp wouldn't have to bring items into the game. Having the choice between gaining better exp or gaining money isn't a bad thing.
Making skilling slower/less rewarding is only gonna frustrate those that do it, and most likely prevent more people from getting into it. It's also a nice slap in the face towards ironmen.
I was online for a decent amount of time yesterday for the first time in around a year and there were 10 players online... that is seriously a joke.
It was new years eve yesterday, of course not a lot of people are going to be online. A low amount of players also isn't too weird for your timezone, considering where the majority of our playerbase is from. That amount of players was kind of normal for your timezone even when we peaked 200.
Not to mention all the people just ge standing begging for stuff.
These people aren't as bad as they seem, while some of them are beyond help, a lot of them just don't know what to do. A lot of them will listen to advice about making money, they just need to be talked to instead of ignored. Which may be difficult considering that most of them can't communicate properly.
2 worlds also means there are twice the amount of pvm locations and so on. With 2 worlds more stuff get into the game than you could ever sink. Closing 1 world would be an easy step towards finding the right solution.
Again I'd like to point out that this wouldn't have very much of an effect. It's very rare for both worlds to be full. It will just add frustration, and it's not worth the trade off.