My opinion on why the game has constantly been losing players

[Lythrilux]

A year on, my opinion as to why things are the way they are:

1) The economy for the game sucks. It's so unvaried, lacks diversity, and thus you get everyone doing that one single route that's only slightly better than everything else. I also think balancing contraband as not-contraband if it can be legally hauled by a group is also part of this problem. Lastly, making money is way too easy. The community is flooded by it (I haven't even needed to trade except once after my ban). There's no longevity to trading whatsoever, as once you get a 5ker doing a couple trade routes every several months can set you up fine. I think the buy/sell price of all commodities should be doubled, and the prices of all ships and equipment scaled up as well to compensate.

2) Balance for the sake of balance that squeezes the fun out of the game. The BC changes were definitely good, mechanically, but I can't help but find BCs just so boring compared to how they were in the past. Sure they were worse as some say, but it was fun.

3) Lazy or Inactive Leaders. 95% of Omicron activity is pretty much just me/Core| pushing for it whilst no one else in the region really applies any effort and expects us to do all the work. This just isn't sustainable. I can't help but feel like if I disbanded Core the region would die (or at best encourage people to pull their finger out and do some work). Generally speaking, there's a lot of leaders failing to reach their potential - if they have any at all - and it's throttling and stagnating both their faction and region.

4) Real toxicity that the Staff isn't dealing with whilst focusing on trivialities. There should seriously be admin action of some kind over the recent Kepler POB stuff. That sort of thing is exactly why people are leaving the game: players get free reign to make others upset and suffer no consequences for it. If the lightning-quick action the staff showed when banning Omi and Shiki recently could be applied to things that matter, this place would be much healthier.

5) Factions and Players realising that in the scope of the game as a whole, their roleplay doesn't really matter, and things are too frequently pre-determined or the players just make zero impact. This doesn't help set-up a living, breathing universe, and Sirius ends up feeling incredibly stale.

6) Dead Universe. All those people hoarding Sci-Data - why aren't they using it to create events? Leaders who don't use their perk points at all, why not at least use them to request events of some kind? Currency of any sort aside, why don't more people try to organise things to keep the game fresh? Outside of this, I feel every House should be constantly at war with another. Military leaders could try to be a bit more warlike and get things rolling.

7) Players have lost interest in the Gallic War. We need to shift the focus of the main story to something else.

---