When I played this, I tended to run into Selvadorada townies around the Omiscan baths. I figured that it was because the locals knew about that spot. I think the idea was probably that you could run into locals if you wanted. It would be kind of nice if we could control the flow of townies and even have lists of them for locations. I do appreciate some randomness but it would probably make a lot of us happy to be able to determine how many townies and even which townies our sims run into.
I end up making over most of the townies that I pay attention to so they become "my" townies. For Selvadorada, I think the main point was that those townies were all from Selvadorada and not the other worlds.
I will also add that while I tend to play very social sims who run into other sims a lot, it can be pretty hard to play a real introvert or the "close knit" lifestyle. The default seems to be more that the townies try to interact with your sims. I mean, I usually like that because my sims are mostly very social but it can be annoying if you want to only pay attention to a small number of your own sims.
A challenge for me would be to play an unflirty close-knit loner. Maybe I'll try it sometime for a change but it would be very weird to me and also difficult to maintain.
