Frankly I do like a lot of changes and general direction where game is becoming more about fighting and less about farming. Fuel cost increase, commets about to be harder to stop, even planet production decrease, but... When you start introducing consecutive changes like that when battle system is constructed in the way bigger players take no losses whatsover and can ravage players 20x smaller there is just no way to close that gap ever. You are introducing class system with players that manage to get big before flushing economy down the drain and newcomers that are just food and will stay like that until they quit the game. And like Kim said, soon there will be no food, just big players with their fleet saved in whatever long moon flight, expeditions or stations hidden in local coords month away.
If you want to dump economy and force people into fighting you have to address that first. Change dmg in the fight so it always hit lower armor unit instead of spreading it, make hiding fleets harder, introduce some more of limited "prizes" that needs to be fought for (more special planets, etc). Just do something that will switch those 20M+ players from sitting on their butts and raiding newbies to fighting other sharks. Currently, majority of introduced stuff is just killing shrimp.

And for the payments... Let's be honest. This game is not so high end that you want to pay in order to be able to play at all. You want to pay if you are fighting someone and need this slight edge to get you ahead. But for that you need free players that will be able to fight and not just be sitting ducks.

Is it just me or rates has improved? I don't think points are back to what it was but at least today I see much more crap around.

With production being cut, pirates rates lowered and fact that much bigger fleet takes literally no losses in combat all newer players are now piñatas. In my humble opinion this is just another deliberate step to make people go on their own and avoid problem with shuting down game while people have paid premiums.

Please tell me what we are supposed to do below 1-2M points to boost economy? Building mines does not pay off in years with CRP+depletion, OPS are totally out of reach before gravity weapon and getting a moon, even if not destroyed straight away would cost few years of production on max planets. Lexx without Celestial shadow 10 is so slow that with such a sparse universe it barely makes more than planet production. Pirates were literraly the only way.

Ok, let me be perfectly clear. There are pirates around but almost nothing above 1k points. It used to be swarming with them and you could choose ones with currently less aggression. Now it's just garbage around not worth fuel cost.

The user on whose account the problem was detected:
kotek

Coordinates:
whole galaxy

Date or time of the incident (according to server time):
Around 2nd April

Description:
Since there is no information about in forum or webpage I decide to report as a bug. Amount of pirates spawned in the galaxy dropped significantly. There is barely anything wherever I look.

Actions required to repeat the problem:


Screenshot: