I repeat myself occasionally, but I've always said that making the game smaller is suicidal. Relative to modern games, this game is already tiny. Yeah a lot of empty unused space, but that could have been fixed long ago. Whats the point if we lose the actual environment that makes the game cool if its all just background. If people are wondering why, after crashes and DDOS attacks, population doesn't climb back up very fast, is because all we get with updates are tweaks to weapons and ships. We need new areas entirely, we need to add more systems, or recycle the least used ones to add something new out there. New players might not feel it, but if you've been here a couple years, the game feels very small. You know all the places that have 'instrumental' value vs 'intrinsic' value (meaning just for looks). With a game this complex and beautiful, I've always found it a shame that most of the environments already are just background. Planets are just things to fly around and look at. You can't build on them, you can't get anything from them, and they have no strategic value. There is also nothing new being DISCOVERED. If we really want new players to come, we need to be advertising a game that is growing, and expanding, not just being refined when it comes to balance numbers or new flhook commands. These are good to have in there, but since i came here in 2012 the only new system added was Omega-9. And there's nothing there, not even a reason to go there. Not to mention systems have recently been removed already, which I found sad. Wudup Tau-39???
People see the mod and they look at the systems and think 'nice'. I waited for more to be added, since I saw how many were added from vanilla. I expected more and more systems to be added. Eventually I realized no one clued in that this was a mistake. New players will only come if they see there is more area being added, with new things that even a new player can get a stake in. If potential players see that nothing has changed (or is going to change) eventually we'll all hit the 'walls' and start bouncing off them. Until we breathe new life into the mod, there will be no change. Don't think of it from our perspective, which is one that we are so disparate for activity, we'd axe half the mod and force everyone into the trade lanes to get satisfaction...think from the potential player's perspective, that hasn't jumped in yet. If they don't get the feeling there will be more and more new things added (especially areas and resources) they will not see this as a living, growing mod, they see it as stagnated, which it is. The folks in charge should be worried about competing with newer more active games, than appealing to the pvp player base. I could care less about weapons balancing (nerfs) compared to actually having a whole new swath of systems to explore, settle, investigate...etc.
Bottom line, shrinking will equal more shrinking. Growing equals more growth. Its that simple.
![[Image: G38aJ6J.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/G38aJ6J.jpg)