Ah, but, you say we shouldn't care how things go, how development has gone, and should just play...yet acknowledge there is barely anyone playing anymore. Just playing at this point has become extremely monotonous. You can't force people to just log for no reason but the same old joust. The game world is awesome and fun, just no way to do anything within in way that has any measurable purpose or meaning.
Even with the RHA, you would have all been much better off having the ability to siege lawful stations and focus on that as an ongoing purpose. If you grow and form a little empire then you get to defend it, or if you can't you can always keep trying and it keeps the point fresh. Why have more civil wars when there already are internal conflicts in each house that could be used, and pretty much each house would wind up with one or two dominant unlawful factions of choice.
Then if people siege POB's it will be for a reason and not out of boredom, they are rarely what would be priority if other bases weren't off limits. RHA only sieged POB's because there was nothing else to do with a big fleet once you have it. But we should be able to do that here, build your fleet. use it, try to maintain your turf with it. If you wind up with no challengers, you expand a bit and a house loses some safe territory. It will either plateau after some new and interesting times or there will be an ongoing push back and forth indefinitely.
To sum up, what keeps me from playing is that the place was constantly adjusted to compensate for a shrinking population, and no one ever entertained allowing for more freedoms that would open up player involvemnt in the common world. PVP should be just a tool to achieve a goal, we should stop focus on balance for a while. and shift to RP depth and game interactivity. No population, no purpose to work on, many in-game abilities outlawed out of paranoia, all meant for a suppressed and dying game world.
With such low population the place is like a caged animal. End the downward trend by adding a new fair system to allow for some orderly growth, and the other aspects of the game will get better again. There's just no way that if things were different we'd still see people leave out of lack of interest. Remember when people were rushing home after work or school to get online? Or when people would log early in the morning hours to trade a bit before staring their day? Was it cruiser or bomber balance that got people like that, or knowing there was an ongoing battle somewhere to get involved in, and become a real fighter in!
What changed? Constant 'no's' from the staff over allowing more options and fixed outcomes. You can't base a game around RP and immersion and caring about what happens and also fix every outcome of every event and keep it all as neutralized as possible to kill off people's effect on the story, Its always been a contradictory system here. Well it worked for years but we got all the years out of that system that we can, we need something new or it will all go to waste in the end. Plenty still could play here, it just needs to finally get serious about being fair. Make use of this world and we'd see a totally different server within weeks!
