Game strated to die long long ago... Some will say it was since the introduction of submarines, some could say with hackshield, but the facts show that for the last 6 years (if not more) $DE guys are trying their best to kill the game. And the results are right there.
There were a lot of bad decisions, fixed with even worst decisions. Hackshield case was epicly fun, thousands of people left the game when hacks became unstoppable, then $DE put the stupid papershield, wich didn't stop the hacks, but incremented crashes and lag, and put security and privacy of users under risk, making another even bigger wave of players leave.
We can't forget the subs, the GMs abusing his powers, the useless monitors/mods, the increasing pay-to-win, the random bans, and then the random un-bans, the retarded event ships, the events becoming worst each year, encouraging the use of credit card over the skill, the new unbalanced content, that had to be balanced later, pissing off the players abusing its advantages, the despice of new players, always aiming to the guys already paying, the poor fleet aimed events, the ruined experience in buggy HAs, the death of fleet leagues, the negative to listening to the community, the misuse of test team, and we could keep going the whole day...
Sure, removing the trade system was the coupe of grace to the game, but if you played pre-2011 NF you know what was a full área during events, more than 30-40 rooms at the same time, or 10 rooms without events. NF didn't died in a single day, it was a slowly killing process, mostly from crap SDE management.
There are better ways to protect the new players than forbiding use of big ships. But they don't care... the biggest credit cards are still from the old players. I said many times, they gave up. They don't want to resurrect the game... they want to keep it plugged to ventilator as long as it lasts.
