Palalet

Not sure what Gloria Estefan has to do with it...
 
but it’s likely that we are feeling their servers starting to strain under untenable load from all the digging that people have done. 
 
that is why finally... after years of people explaining to NQ the flawed nature of their ridiculously pointless-and-redundant planetary voxel persistence model (or alternatively: stupidly believing that NQ had really HAD invented some never-before-seen data storage and retrieval methods) their 100% verbose dig record-keeping has come back to bite them in the arse. 
 
it might also be likely that they just can’t afford the bandwidth/processing capacity any longer given they are down to just a dozen or so still-paying customers, ? and have turned down the auto spool-up rate/ max number limit on their virtual servers.

I loved it when I played - totally a one off though in terms of success. Nothing else like it. Plus it had lore, PvE, stories and an economist!! The biggest populations were still in safe space essentially funding the PvP.

Why should an MMO require consensual PVP to be a success? I think that is simply not the case. Lore and stories are created from the basic game concept. EVE lore and stories did not exist 20 years ago, only the basic concept of how New Eden evolved from the original wormhole to/from earth collapsing with many humans not able to get back. Much of the lore in EVE is created by players actually. DU only has the beginning of Lore in the arrival of the ARK ship and NQ already had to remove much of the original story to work around their server limitations.

Frankly I think @Sycopata pretty much hits the nail on the head in his OP..
 
NQ's failure to deliver is not because the developers they hired are not able to deliver. I do not mean this to come across as demeaning to devs work but they are there not to design a game or make a mechanic work. They are there to write code. They are the very professionals who could have made the game work and who could have made the game be way further ahead than where it is now. IF the managers directing them and giving them their work allocation has an actual plan and strategy to get to where they want to go.
 
The problem with NQ is that at its core it was made up of JC and some of his "friends" with early employees being granted powers way beyond their competence while ferociously sticking to "the vision" and never even cared enough to actually take note or and listen to what the community had to say.
 
Much of the problems the game has today were seen or predicted by many in the community as far back as the last few months of 2017 once pre-alpha opened. The biggest mistake NQ made was to not allow the facts of actual game design and development allow the vision to shift and change to accommodate what was achievable instead of what was envisioned. Up to the point where the vision of JC smashed into the wall called reality late last year, all we got was "you just do not understand". Well.. guess what, we do and did and the one who actually did not understand was finally ousted and has now left NQ. 
 
What will become of NQ now is unknown, while I had hope for a positive outcome early April, by now I do not think that NQ will have a chance to survive I'm afraid.  The total absence of any sort of information from the top, not a single word from the new CEO nor any official press releases about the change in leadership leads me to believe that NQ was given a bridge capital to allow them to continue at a minimal sustainable level while a more permanent financial solution is sought out or a decision is made to turn off the lights.  
 
Everything NQ has done since beta has been focused on bringing cost down, first the "big database rewrite" and changes to industry to reduce the IOPS activity and with it the server cost which went through the roof as "beta" hit. Then schematics to further reduce the biggest drain on funding, again being the server cost, then the support BPO contract being terminated, removing live online support and finally the removal of JC himself late March. Since then, development has all but halted and so far the only thing on the table is the changes to screens which again, seems mostly driven by a need to reduce server interaction/cost and the announcement of mining being shifted to a numbers game, removing actual digging and actual ores being in the ground entirely. The mission system if delayed and I can't help but wonder if that too is because the load on the back end and the IOPS cost of that would be something NQ can't afford.
 
Right now NQ has basically removed any and all commitment to releasing anything and the updates we've seen so far are pretty much indicative of maintenance mode. NQ seems to be waiting for funding or closing shop after a sale.

What? What discord were you on? This game has about the fewest white knights and the loudest bickering of any game I’ve ever played. 
 
if you were drowned out by the half dozen or so people who still believe in NQ, I’d say your technique is lacking. 

This you propose has a problem, because although the opinion of the people who continue to play is very important, really the opinion of the people who are no longer playing is what matters, because you have to correct what has pushed people to quit the game, not to focus on what the few people who are still in the game like.
 
It may seem very unnatural to ignore people who think that the game is fine, but going down that path will end the project, because when you are only satisfying a very faithful minority, you are failing.
 
We can try to complicate things to the extreme, but it would be enough to stop the nonsense and begin to understand that the game is not fun, and it is enough to return to the basics of game design, creating a minimum loop.
 
It's really a player-generated quest system for other players that is important right now? Surely not, because the players who keep playing are already self-sufficient or they couldn't play.
 
What needs to be introduced are mechanics that bring players back to the game and add accessible and varied activities. The game needs to create mechanics like PvE that motivate to build combat ships even for those who do not intend to participate in PvP have a minimum of action and take a little longer to realize that they are in a Euro Space Truck.
 
You have to introduce mining through ships, because in a space game, it looks stupid to mine like worms on foot, and have another variant that is not a transport ship / combat ship
 
We must introduce industrial mobile cores, because I want factories on this planet today and maybe tomorrow I want them on another, and they are too boring to configure and, by God, because is also fun make big factory ships!
 
I think it has been decided to take the easy way too many times, and that most decisions have been more a matter of not facing technical problems than of offering something fun.

The problem with this game: The developers who make decisions, make them thinking about how difficult they are to implement, rather than thinking about how important they are for the game to work.
 
The game requires: Extreme consumption of materials, so all the mechanics of the game would have to consume materials, including industry, maintenance of territories, cores etc ... Use your own brain.
 
Introduction to PvP through PvE, as it is implausible to think that the non-hardcore player is capable of introducing himself to PvP dominated by expert players, in a game where PvP does not admit any errors.
 
Division of PvP zones according to difficulty tiers, separating resources into zones according to distance and adding wealth of resources at a greater distance from the safe zone, the random distribution of things and the existence of mega nodes in the safe zone was not very smart , the game map has to be above all a player distribution tool, not something purely aesthetic and subjected to a roll of the dice, Games like albion online, they have redesigned their map many times, because they understand the importance of a good field of games.
 
Facilitate solo combat, it is very difficult for PvP players to emerge and more complicated is that you manage to coordinate with another PvP player, collective combat will always have an advantage, but do not prevent personal progress, since honestly most of the time it is a single player who is that pulls the cart, and it is not very motivating for a player like that to think that at any moment he can run out of options if his partner fails him.
 
A sandbox is not fun by itself, that is why they are always installed in a park where there are other elements that children play with when creativity runs out, do your part to create the rest of the things that a park contains, instanced pvp modes, where you can design your ship and put it to the test in a training environment could be a source of learning for both players and developers.