First of all, let's keep the trolling and spamming to a minimum. If you have anything to add then please do so.

The problem with Betas is that they are boring due to mechanics and hardly anything is happening on them. Once one bloc gains superiority over the other, it's beneficial and easy to capture every single outpost in the game and lock anyone else off. It's the root cause for stagnation. There's no room for two or even more blocs to co-exist. Capturing and holding stations is effortless with superior numbers and the game ends up with lots of unutilized but potential terrain that should be generating content for players.

We have examples of it scattered across the history: A year ago one bloc owned everything, others got bored and didn't play. Right now another bloc is doing the exact same thing after gaining lead over the previous. We have few other corporations living on Beta, but they're there only because the lead bloc permits it.

The same state of affairs will repeat until something is done to it. Someone will emerge and capture everything, which leads to people getting bored and stopping playing beyond what's necessary to keep the EP running.

The proof that population's decline is directly related to Betas is visible from the results of different features and patches applied to it: First hit to the population came with the walls and probes when the developers intended to make Betas safer to live on. People obviously exploited it to the fullest and we ended up with islands that became almost impossible to roam on. There was a noticable decline in PVP and population numbers. Secondly, the biggest hit came with the introduction of Gammas. Betas became obsolete and within two months of implementation, PVP was as close to death as possible. We ended up with 30-odd kills per month versus hundreds previously.

There's been small resurrections to PVP as developers added content and people returned to investigate, but it was always short lived. After the initial boom, there's still not much going on and people return to other games.

Betas are the bread-and-butter content makers in the game. Developers, you need to work on Betas if you want the game to ever reach thousands of concurrent players.