Inda asked me to write what I think, although god knows I don’t think you will do any of it.

But .. a way to bring the game back. All of this isn’t perfect solutions but in theory is stuff you can do pretty quickly before having a proper fix list later. You may consider this a lot of steps backward but when you have walked in to a field of landmines and lost 99% of your troops it’s the only way to get out alive.

Balance:

1)      Remove Gamma. Until your population recovers its just empty space or unassailable places to create wealth
2)      Bring back the old ore mechanics with static massive red spots on beta and less beneficial ones on alpha. The dynamic spawns made beta industry harder and alpha industry easier. And never ending spawns of the same ore type is a recipe for disaster (as eve found out recently).
3)      Revert the recycling nerf and revert plasma. Both these changes made you not bother to sell your loot and made you nic independent. It was market breaking and caused the emptiness you see today. You also don’t need plasma with the new missions and its just a cause of a lot of botting / beacon pit crazyness as well as people having millions of old modules they don’t sell because they are worthless.
4)      Revert all mech / balance changes including diminishing returns until we are back before the horrific imbalance that created undemobable bots. It was really well balanced before. Its just got steadily worse since.
5)      Bring the syndicate bots back to the drawing board. As a rough rule of thumb new mechs and content should be awesome and then nerfed a couple of times back to sanity until the new awesome thing comes. That’s what gets people interested, makes a fotm that’s exciting and causes them ice sales.

Make Beta great again!

The aim is to reduce risk

6)      Make Beta 1 stations unlocked (but still able to be taken). Yes that dead horse. Review it once the population rises perhaps but for now lets go back to post release mechanics.
7)      Remove detectors from the game and nerf the view range of the smaller bots and mechs. No more seeing an island in thirty seconds. Make roaming great again.
8)      Increase the undock vulnerability. All those undock and look guys can get bent.
9)      Restrict missions to station owners. Give a reason for ownership.
10)   Increase the loot drop rate for PvP to 100%
11)   Allow jumping with a PvP flag only from beta to beta, not beta to alpha

Market

12)   NPC sell orders for all Mechs and bots (not heavies or gliders) at a price that’s above mineral cost
13)   NPC sell orders for weaponry up to tech 3 (until the market is back)

PVE

14)   Bring back the old squad mission money. Changing this was the worst act of seppuku I’ve seen in this game. People loved it and you *** it up despite us all begging.
15)   Mining and harvesting missions should put the equivalent amount of material in the local station on an NPC sell order
16)   The new beacons are fine but the pay out is horrible, make them in line with squad missions
17)   The chance based tickets for items are fine as a concept but they should be decent pay out instead of useless. Start a thread asking for pay out ideas.
18)   Bring back red spawns and decent observers everywhere

That will do for now. Most of this is just removing the terrible mess you have made with balance and risk / reward. Some of it people won’t like and in a mature game they will be right but you need it to be easy to grow and play and engage right from the beginning when your game is empty.

Once all that is done (and only after its done) you can do a wipe of assets, skillpoints and wallets (leave the tech tree for corps and individuals) and make the game FTP. You can make money through skillpoint starter packs and ice.

Now we have finally given up on this game we gave given eve a go again.
:(
Our current home is in Pandemic Horde as it fits our eclectic mix of play styles and allows anyone in with no preconditions or requirements.

You will find us doing PVE and PvP down there.

Feel free to join our in game channel 'Jokers' - mail Jita Horde for the password.

You can also find us on our discord, log in details are in the corp MOTD. If you are not from 'Jokers' but want to hang out then mail me on the forums and I'll send you the details.