Are you participating in Cake vs Pie?

This is exactly why I'm not participating.
All of my characters are set to train/search for loot far away from the "main towns".

They really should have better thought out the system as far as town distribution is concerned.
Really, what's the point of having different pools for different towns anyway?
More people could/would participate if the NPCs were in every town and there was one large pot.

That's a leftover from last year's original design, where the fight map was the town map, so having one big pot would mean one insanely big crowd.
(Which it did anyway because people would tele or travel to every town just for the fights)
It became less necessary when they changed it to have separate battles in each channel, and limited the number of people who could enter the map.
Now that they have a special instanced battle map with pre-determined team sizes, the whole 4 town thing has become utterly unnecessary. Well, except for the rewards like 10% exp and discounts on potions, but really, wouldn't be any harm to just give it for the whole world or drop it entirely. People participate for the insignia, anyway.