I would say the golden age for me was the months following the addition of capture points in the LvD server up to the Red Uprising. The sheer amount of mass that got killed on the server during that time was easily in the 10s of millions... turns out, a lot of it was exploited resources, but it was still fun as hell. BDoW did a good job of getting people out of their bases and trying to hold territory. I think if the game supported more of the community driven admin level stuff , that we could see more interest grow.
That said, another issue which I hate to admit is skill gap. We've got these 3-5 year vets that are just so much better than noobs that I think that getting into the game may be becoming intimidating. In the past it was like this faction might have a good AMS, that one has some good armor techniques, and this third one was good at staging weapons, but now it's like the top 20% of players know ALL of that shit very well, so every noob that comes far enough along to try to bridge the gap is getting 3-6 months into it thinking they finally have stuff figured out, then along comes one of us bastards and fracks them in a ship a fraction of their size without even taking a scratch. Or worse, one of us hears there is a fight finally happening after a month of quiet and then 8 guys in heavy cruisers show up to nuke a few drones.
