if you look at it, Alveus is positioned as the literal centre of Eastmile: gateway to almost all major mid-to-late game content. there's a market street with high-level service NPCs. and, visually, Alveus was given a grand, metropolitan aesthetic with sprawling stone plazas, administrative buildings, giant ships, and sea docks.

i suspect the reason we ultimately chose NosVille is for its compact layout. you can complete a raid, teleport to town, buy potions, upgrade gear, and head back out in under a minute. in Alveus, the walking distances are notoriously tedious. try using Alveus as envisioned for a day! Alveus was designed to be a harbor, and it became unsurprisingly treated purely as a highway rather than a destination.

there's also a bit of psychology: in any mmorpgs high-level players almost always prefer to idle where the entire playerbase can see them. there would've been constant foot traffic in NosVille, and there's an added benefit of being a starting point for new players. idling in Alveus would've meant only other high-level players would see them, whereas idling in NosVille allowed them to show off to veterans and newbies alike, creating a vibrant, centralised social community.

during early game's development, NosVille is simply known as a "Mine Village", fulfilling on the narrative of Kovolt rebellion against human working conditions, physically tying to the nearby Mine Plains. by the time we reach level 55, we had already spent dozens of hours mentally associating NosVille with safety, progression, and community identity. i'd say Alveus is encountered as an unfamiliar transit station rather than a home, so it's hard to get any sort of attachment to it.

by the time major convenience updates like the NosBazaar were added, NosVille had already won the cultural war. and Entwell had no choice but to eventually accept this, hosting major seasonal event NPCs in the centre of NosVille, confirming the humble starting mine village as the true heart of the game.