Removal of the system off the player list?

[Omi]

Perhaps the random flying around was what caused the higher population? Gotta have more things moving if you want chaos after all.

No it wasn't. The population is down because of many factors (the main one being that people get tired, grow up, and move on after years playing near enough the same thing in the same space with development that was, for the longest time, either stagnant or flawed).

I actually have enough random encounters while blindly flying around.

This is bollocks, unless you and I have radically different definitions of the word 'random'.

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I can't really see how this change will help. I'm sure it was predictable enough to any number of people reading which side I'd come down on, but really - it was hard enough to find anything worth hauling yourself onto the server for before, and now it's even worse. The change is just about passable for the House regions - Bretonia, Liberty, Rheinland etc - but when Border Worlds could (from the nav map) mean anything from Champagne to Omega-55 to Sigma-13, and Independent Worlds being anything from Cortez to Galileo, then it's a total catastrophe. All in all, the only thing this change does is appease the crowd who, funnily enough, weren't trying to find any interaction beyond their own clique of friends anyway.

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