My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players

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Those were good times, but will not return. Never ever and it´s very naive to think otherwise (after all, how many similarly old games you know whose playerbase is steady for years or even growing in numbers)?

I've already mentioned WoW vanilla which is 2003 as well and being played heavily as of today on private servers and will be so on the official legacy, EVE is still living (there was no changes to the core gameplay since the launch of the game, just slight improvements over functionality and ship additions in general), various mentioned Quakes. You can also add SWG, SW:JA + mods, older Dooms with mods, you name it.