Maybe players who took a break or quit before got hyped about the new expansion so they started playing and then the expansion landed and they left again due to the disappointment?
After all, CCP didn’t stop/nerf ganking in Equinox so it is understandable.
Wait! What? Was it ganking and not Equinox that finally killed EVE???
Wow, just Wow.
You can’t hide from the truth !!
It is always a gankers fault…
Well it didn’t make me want to go back.
More tedium and for what? The same HS/LS anoms that are also 20 years old like rally points and havens? A pittence of ore that still won’t let me replace my ships without a JF service?
I get that they’re hamstrung by nulbloc CSM members from doing anything that would make Nulsec fun again but making it more tedious so leadership can get passive income again isn’t going to make nulsec fun for anyone, ESS defense fleets were already boring and asset safety made popping a structure, one of the most brain meltingly boring activities into the game, into an unrewarding job since nothing can ever drop again.
Nulsec needs to be dangerous, rats that point but have good bounties so you have to commit if someone jumps you, but at the same time those bounties should pay out more to compensate, but right now you’re just spining in circles with a 100mn ishtar (probably multiple across multiple empty dead systems) with a plethora of citadels littering your space that you’re 100% safe all the time, and come on, if you have to jump through so many hoops to get T1 ore to spawn, you should be able to get enough ore to build your ships, scarcity already nerfed caps so they aren’t pure minerals anymore, that doesn’t mean T1 ore should be held on a sacred pedestal.
I cannot help but feel that code to ensure some measure of balance across time zones has actually ruled out the surprise element in Eve.