So most cap escalations start from nothing and rapidly escalate as each side attempts to dominate the field with bigger and bigger toys. In the old world anything could fit a cyno making that escalation very easy to achieve. Essentially there are now 2 issues to work around in escalating a fight:
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Cynos cannot be fit to doctrine ships - An escalation will typically start as a subcap fight. For example you could be in a Munin fleet that lands on grid against an enemy fleet of Eagles. Eagles have greater range and damage so you start to lose the field. You can no longer drop that cyno to start the escalation process to attempt to reclaim the field. Recons are no competition for Eagles, they have paper thin tank compared to HACs, if you bring a few to help escalate, they’ll just get blapped off the field before you can use them. You can sit them cloaked, but again the second they drop a cyno they’ll be blapped OR you accept you’ll be bringing your caps in 150km off grid, which makes them pretty useless post HAW nerf.
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Cynos cannot be fit to caps - Your first wave of escalation is usually to dreads/carriers/fax. To escalate to supers once regular caps are on field you need a capital with a cyno fitted. Any subcap will just get blapped by dreads in <1 second. So again you’ll need to position your recon off grid, say 150km away - in which case your titans are going to be useless.
CCP are moving away from supercap fights which is why my 4 accounts are unsubbed.
You can argue whether subcap or cap gameplay is more compelling in general, but for my personal circumstances - and for a lot of other null sec residents - cap gameplay was what we played for. I longed for that ping to come on Discord calling for max caps to form up. They just don’t happen now. The game needs more caps to die and null seccers want to risk them more, but CCP is making that difficult.
I can never know, but from what I see in alliance chat and forums, my hunch is that the drop in players is mostly players like me from null sec. You can’t just nerf caps (HAW nerf, cyno nerf, blackout) and expect cap pilots to continue to sub, we’re not idiots, we recognise CCP is actively shifting away from our playstyle and we’re choosing to play another game instead.
That could ultimately be good for the the game, it could be that when you reach bittervet status like me that you’ve effectively won Eve if all that’s keeping you is cap fights.