My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players

[Batavia]

I can't tell what the ultimate solution would be, and I don't want to sit down and figure something out*,

*we have Karlotta for that

Yes we do. Bless me.

Funny that. I replied to that thread five months ago to tell you why that doesn't work. Pretty much killed the thread. I'd love to hear your rebuttal, but I haven't.

Your graphs and the explanations given do not follow from each other because your underlying assumptions are incomplete and easy to circumvent. Your proposal just cuts content without giving anything in return. Network routing is essentially a pricing issue, not a connectivity issue. Data packages (players, in this case) go out of their way to avoid bottlenecks, because they're pricey, and with every node (base) being agnostic in terms of being an entry or exit point for a trade route, there's no telling exactly where players will be at any given point, meaning they'll be just as randomly distributed as they are now. Some nodes having a higher connectivity than others does not translate into higher chances of encounters, just in higher changes of repetitive most optimal paths. But without any reason to linger in a location, there is never going to be the build-up of traffic that leads to encounters, as statistically everyone remains just as likely to pass by each other as before.

If you want to increase the chance of encounters, you actually have to concentrate node density, not edge density. Which basically translates to: put 50% of commodity points of sales in ~2% of the systems, without increasing the amount of dockable bases, and spread the other 50% among 98% of the systems. Then adjust commodities and prices to have a directional flow from low density areas ("rural production" aka mining in Freelancer) to high density areas, while labour intensive commodities (consumer goods) flow between densely populated areas only. For example: a hauler flying between New Berlin and New Tokyo should always incur an opportunity goods for selling their goods in the Sigmas, rather than being guaranteed an equal credits/second rate regardless of where they go. Ideally, doing all this, when in the most profitable areas, it should have to take a hauler several minutes of queuing behind other players and/or NPC's before they get to land, with the queuing happening in about 2% of the map where the highest profits area. That's an actual bottleneck giving pirates targets to raid, and house police targets to protect.

Your proposal of just increasing edge connectivity density does nothing when players can bypass each other just as well as before, since edge capacity is basically unlimited in Freelancer. It is node capacity that is limited and which should be focused on. Systems are not nodes, just a collection of edges. Traders just going past each other and going "Hai, bye!" is not an engaging encounter.

To illustrate, have a picture of where economic activity is located in the US:

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07-09-2018, 06:15 PM