So, I was thinking about various ways to improve the territory systems--and most of them involved having the Factions work to have an invested interested in the local community... which would ultimately require a few outcomes of such attempts involving the local people living there to attempt to kick factions out of a community.
Then I started thinking... wait, how would we do that without having some long deserted account being put in that role. It would kind of end up silly with how that stuff would eventually play out. Having various accounts randomly selected by Duke for Duke Missions works fairly well... but it might be pertinent to have a set of procedurally generated NPC players that exist separate of the PC players for these various events.
I was thinking they could just have some kind of group of numbers and ids for NPC players (like... ever id below 1024 is a super player id or something)... but then I started thinking... why not have NPCs be a portion of the population separate from the PCs. The NPCs would be able to have similar stats as the PCs--but they would not be under the same dog tag system and would not get the Merit Badges and Chevrons that Torn PCs would get attached to them.
Then I started thinking about how ever day, there are thousands of Mexican Ambassadors who get assassinated in Torn. What if we had these NPCs being people who have the jobs that the various crimes would target? We'd have each crime randomly target various NPCs in this area of things and have each NPC keep track of how many times they've had a crime done to them. We'd have them have a work place and home that would be able to influence Faction territory systems. Heck, if a bunch of NPCs end up having crimes randomly happen to them all live and work in a faction's territory--they might just start attempting an uprising there.
Hell, this could even be useful for various future agents. As Duke's whole thing of doing stuff involving various PC characters actually works fairly well for how that character works.
I would not move Duke into that area of things... as Duke continues a long tradition of GM shameless self insert Mary Sue characters--and is like our own local Lord British... except Duke is not as much of a punching bag as Lord British who can be comparable to Kenny from South Park at times (Oh my gog! They killed Lord British! You griefers!).
I mean... having a section of code devoted to keeping track of the life and times of all the Mexican Ambassadors who get assassinated, and the various mugged Lawyers, might not be useful at this point--but it is one of those code bases that will be very tempting to draw into various future updates.
edit: For people who are worried about how such a divide in population would be explained, we'd just point out that the NPCs are the population members that do not have that bad smell associated with them, and have more of a nice sweet smell--as PCs just have variety of bad smells to us. With it being suggested this is a future plot hook--but just keep that hook dangling 5ever (5ever is more than 4ever)