I wake from my sleep to give my few cents. Funny, I did had a dream weeks ago where I was typing stuff in here.
The game did not become full derelict because of a single thing, but rather a series of misjudgements and lack of luck that slowly put us on this situation. I'll enumerate it.
1) Releasing on steam too early
This is the most obvious, yet debatable mistake from the dev. I always insisted on the people who got exposed to a very incomplete game will most likely, never come back, no matter how shiny it may look in 2030. However, we will never know if this was made due to funding urgency, because regardless, some people out there did buy, and this could had helped in a local crisis in the dev's life.
They say it wasn't the case, but that doesn't mean I believe it.
2) BP update
A feature that got cheered up by many at the time, but I was against ever since the first day it got announced. Most people just weren't able to foresee just how bad this could go.
Forcing the players to move away from the arcade setting that marked the 2013's hottest days from the more survival and grindy approach would have to happen anyway, someday. But it should never had happened on this cursed day on 2014.
The players who were used to a relaxed game where you could make your own ship on SP (or a build server) to quickly deploy on a real server for action, suddenly found themselves having to deal with a incomplete and archaic crafting system. And to make things worse, the asteroid spawning rating were problematic as a goth depressed girl could be, making shield blocks a real pain to make. You would have to spend hours and hours grinding to spawn this 400k ship you built... to get involved in 1 minute of combat. A unbalance between effort and fun was made.
And guess what was the quickest and easiest solution the players found? Planet mining. Time would pass and Planet mining would still be a thing for years to come, with players positioning their giant AFK miners to alt-tab, while screwing with the server and everyone's ping. Some servers did make up some rules to combat this, but it was useless, everyone did, few got caught. I can tell, because I did it as well.
There was also one final ill that this update brought to the game: since there was no credit purchases anymore, that meant the credit cap was gone too. Even though one or two servers removed the cap via scripts (I think it was rebel alliance who later became redshit) most still had it. With no caps, we saw the births of growing 1mil, 2mil, 7mil mass bricks who would only serve to piss people off, especially those who played on low-end PC's.
3) Council
The intentions behind the construction of the council were noble, but how they handled it, and the drama that it generated, just created a rift between the more prominent players from the staff.
4) The power update
Even though it's one of the most blamed villain for the game's current derelict state for most, if not all veterans, who were always jaded af from the last events. I don't really think it deserves all this credit for it. The community and the servers were already in bad shape and this was just a couple of the nails in the coffin.
