Hegemon, is the ship with the highest cargo and can mine at the same time(ores, which are profitable). A IMG Hegemon can make a profit of 27/28 million with a full load of gold ore.
Whereas, a 5k of any shipping corporation...takes 15-17 million for the ship to be filled full with gold ore. And at the sell point, you can make a profit of 30-35 million. And also, hegemons are screwed up in TL, whereas I can insta dock in TL when in most of the 5k ships, except the Colossus and maybe the Shetland. So, the shipping companies have a higher profit in terms of ore hauling.
If a IMG char wants to haul ore, he also has to pay the miner( he cant get that free). His cargo hold is a max of 4200. So obviously the profit is again less than that of what a Shipping company can get from hauling ores.
Well, the factions that has the highest activity also has people who have RL problems. JM is a quasi lawful faction, where there is not much profit to be made. But still they are above many trading factions in the activity list. The reason is, they make sure that, it is fun, when actually a group of people log in and do that thing, whatever it might be. They log in groups, since they know that sinlge man piracy is very boring.
But thats not the case with many trading factions, as I dont see many trading factions, where there are more than 1 or 2 ships logging in at the same time. Thats not the devs/admins/players problem, that means that the said factions dont have a big presence in the forums and in game, which makes them relatively less known to people, and basically, who wants to join a faction who hardly come in game and dont even have a commendable forum presence whereas they can play as indies and benefit from the same with even more OORP benefits.
Try to advertise shipping factions indirectly via forum RP, bonus for newcomers, in game presence and much more. So, you can actually get more recruits. A single person is enough to set up a RP via the forums and take it in game.
