IIn terms of declining of numbers i have spoken to various former d2 players who have either left the game or gone purely to gsa play and a large proportiton of them agreed that there is too much rules and regulations nowaydays and even arguments produced by OOB and other shiplist related issues between certain races have made them leave the game. This is not purely the only reason why they have left as DH rightly said the game is ageing, but it is a significant reason nonetheless.
And before that we all heard from numbers of players (and techically larger numbers at the time) who quit because of the
-lack of regulations,- multiple BB fleets, BCHfests, PhG's
G racks, lack of being able to compete with someone who built up prestige and could afford multiple DN's/BB's/CVA's, the lack of fighter CnC (reCavIII's,)
the lack of restricitons on Escorts and droners, the mission time disparity between droners and races without drones, multiple ship fleets that
work exceptionally well for some races (Droners) and poorly for others (Lyrans, Roms)
Really I have no issue with people saying they like/hate/wnat to change OOB stuff.
Personally I like it -but I'm not really interested in flying DN's so I'm not the best person to comment because I don't care
if I'm assigned one or not.
What I don't like is this" I've talked to players and they left because of OOB.."
No F*cking kidding.
(and it's not a shot at Chuut or Grim there buds, others have said it and I hate it as much)
PLayers have left for that reason, as well as the lack of OOB reason, they've left cuz the game is old, they've left
cuz they feel like playing something else. If you want to argue for OOb or non OOB fine, just don't bring that stupid "players left because of xxx"
stuff into it.
Goes both ways.
As has been said- if you've got some good ideas throw them out, I'm trying to set up a couple of servers and have
absolutley no qualms about stealing ideas that I think will work and using them for my own.