Why is the community population declining?

[Challenger]

And as for my making the game better... I've spent WELL over 400 hours on the mod, and counting, fixing bugs, making new toys for people ready for the game and all that. That my efforts aren't always appreciated it something I've learned to accept. Frankly, any dev in it for the long haul will eventually dev just because he/she enjoys to create stuff rather then cater to the playerbase's changing desires. You'd go mad just by keeping up. Example:
- 4.85: Dublin. People complain there's so many newbs in the system, pirates attacking with oneliners, miners cloaking out. Called for potential solutions, people suggested to make more, similar profit mining runs. Cannon asked me to reduce the Dublin run profit as well to motivate people to seek other mining adventures.
- 4.86: Molly players complain there's noone left in Dublin. BMM complains they have no cashcow run anymore (which was a flatout lie, the highest profit-for-time run in the game is Beryllium from Cambridge to Dortmund). Pirates complain the miners are gone. Also bullcrap, they just moved to Omega 7 and Tau 23 for the most part.
- 4.87: Reduce the amount of mining fields again to concentrate resources/activity and end up with the same problems as in 4.85? Is the payoff of concentrated activity bigger then the drawback of "inexperienced" players in that mix?

I'm not sure that question has a right answer. We've spent the last three years doing an experiment, in some sense. More systems have been introduced, and all of them have had their trade routes balanced to make them equally viable. This has been achieved - but did we get what we want out of it? 160 people on the server, and I only see two when I fly from one side of Kusari to the other.

I wouldn't dream of second-guessing the dedication and hard work our admins and development team have put in to this. And I'd even go so far as to say that the problems we had in 4.84 are fixed. (Minus purple goddess nerf.) I'm certain that if we had 225 players online, my criticisms would be baseless. But the fact of the matter is that we tried to fix the problem by spreading people out, and succeeded. Now we can look back and ask ourselves: Is this really what we wanted to do?