In my opinion our wilderness is dead because we're not a pking server.
If we wanted a thriving wilderness which is full 24/7, then let's make 90% of our items spawnable.
Other than that, we can keep trying to fill our wilderness up with a bunch of people, but when most of our player base are PvMers/gamblers it's not going to work. We can only make it more enjoyable for our current pkers and hope that it brings in a bit more of a crowd.
But I honestly feel like a lot of pkers expect us to have a wilderness like spawn pk servers. Why would anyone want to come onto an eco server to pk when it's a ton of work to get your supplies.
---
With this idea, 50% of the gold you spend buying back your items is dropped.
So let's say you reduce the amount you spend to get your items back when you die in the wilderness.
Sure, it's now good because you're spending less gp getting your items back.
But now, when you kill someone in these items they are also going to be dropping less GP.
So you're back to the problem, it's still not profitable because realistically, nothing would change.