There is another point i wanted to make in the post about improving the influx of new players, this time not by trying to attract people but rather by reducing the amount of paths they can take when starting. I'd have to digress to explain the reasoning behind this.
So we all know there has been a lot of discussions in the past about server mergers, however estimates from the dev team showed that this idea would take too long to execute. Main reason why merging was even considered was that some servers were almost completely inactive like Aeria and Kalgan, and these days maybe even Solaria and Trantor. I could be wrong about some servers but im saying this from what i've heard about them and seen from screenshots.
Lets now consider the experience of an average new player. Assuming that most have an equal incentive to go for any of the servers, up to 50% of new players may quit after a few days just because they had bad luck of choosing a dead server to start with. Problem is that to know populations of servers they would have to play long enough to hear that information from other players, by which time they had probably given up already even if they liked the game.
If, instead of doing a massive merger, devs diverted the traffic of new players, only allowing them to start on Gaia, Askone and etc, we would get a slight insurgence of new pilots on these servers that actually are active. Perhaps it would be fair to allow pilots who still play on dead servers to transfer their accounts to an active one of their choice. Number of transfers needed here would be minimal and after a while, so everyone willing to transfer has time to do it, these servers could even be closed. This would ultimately increase the amount of new players starting and playing on active servers keeping them running for a while longer.