Please, dont insult me. It's nice to see this faction more active, but that's still very low numbers. And when you look in details, it's only 2 or 3 active members. Maybe september and october has an impact, but when the test started, all top five active faction was at +10 days (sorry i didnt take a screen but i remember this quite well), Congress was at 40 days and JM was nearly 15 days. So, as you said, September/october has maybe an impact, but we were already in this period 2 weeks ago... So your argument is a little irrelevant. You say that you doubt that jump trading restriction significantly affect server activity, it does, as numbers show it. I dont shout: look it's kills activity or something of this kind as some people do, i bring elements of proofs. A lot of indies were just playing together to jump. Yes, maybe it doesnt create a lot of interaction with others, but in what it hurts you? This indies wont use trade lanes, so it's just player lost who has probably left the server. I didnt do congress jump who was at 5 am in my timezone, but i know that since the restriction began, this players dont log anymore (as numbers show). And remember that some players had fun to hunt this jumpers, players who hasnt this reason to loganymore (Yes, probably distorted argument but still one ) What i try to do is to spotlight elements that since the restriction began, WE lost a lot of activity, nothing else. After anyway, it will always be admins/dev choice and we cant do something against that.
There are small factions and big factions, small factions have less activity time. My only point was to show that your words about "all factions lost activity" were simply wrong, nothing more.
Also don´t forget that activity tracker has a month delay. So if faction made lot of activity in April and less on September, the tracker will significantly go down in the second part of September and beginning of October when all April numbers disappear. So those high numbers you mention were simply created in the second half of April and beginning of September and stayed there until beginning of October (when restriction trial period began). Also, you speak about indies, but we don´t have any data about them.
By the way, you still didn´t explain me how can jumping restriction affect non-trading factions and how can cause their activity numbers to go down.
Last thing, you are speaking about players who were secretly jumping and if they can´t they will trade outside lanes or leave completely. I may be a little harsh, but is that really damage if we lose players which put all their effort to avoid any interaction? Because I will very likely almost never meet these players anyway so I actually can´t recognize the difference when they play and when they don´t. On the other hand some jumpers will return to traditional trading so it can create more interactions then.
Hunting jumptraders was incredibly hard (and actually almost impossible without at least some slice of metagaming) so people quickly got bored from trying it. I actually tried myself so I know it. Same as I know that if you by accident were able to catch them, you usually got lot of complaining because they were upset that somebody found them and is "stupidly destroying game for them" to quote one of them.
I assume that .j. was hit by the restriction probably the most so you have reason to fight against it. But it is still hard to understand for me that players will rather stop playing than simply start common trading again what were players doing here for years. Maybe I´m about getting old and too old-fashioned. But I still keep my opinion that jumping restriction was good decision which will bring more good than harm.