Not you, never heard you do that. Just a comment in general. Mostly happens on 200. No one wants to get shoved into a spotlight for having not developed equal skills over night.
YKW and some of his clan were epic in it.
Even with it's "bad settings" we still have the best gameplay already. I doubt some settings will draw many in, I don't think it's a selling point, that's for current players. Some of these settings are to help new players. "I'm a new player and I joined because they made this setting change", said no one ever. You may get some return players on SOME of that.
Players eventually leave games, just because life or interest changes. If you don't have replacement numbers higher than those moving on, well,...it's just a matter of time.
If ya want new or return players we're gonna have to think outside the box. Everyone talks advertising, which should be #1, but they'd rather talk about settings and wishlist.
Some tweaking in graphics and spreading the word is IMO the key to any hope. Settings won't matter if they never even hear of the game. <shrug> 
It's fairly simple. They just need to revamp the game into something completely different.
Get rid of the ongoing war, that kind of gameplay isn't popular. To be honest I'm not sure if it ever was. IMO in its heyday, people were tolerating the ongoing war because it was the best flying game out there at the time and people stayed in spite of that gameplay, not because of it. As soon as there were alternatives that were still open PVP but instead had rounds where you have a short 20-30 minute fight where there's a winning and losing side, most people, particularly young people went to that.
A relative minority enjoy the gameplay provided here and don't want the above, but they're a minority.
Give them points at the end of each round that work toward some kind of progression, plane unlocks, skins, etc. Or allow them to buy stuff with real money.
F2P kind of goes without saying of course.
Honestly I've kind of come to the conclusion HT may have been pretty smart not throwing a crapload of money, effort, and time into a game whose core structure isn't popular and isn't likely to see a resurgence. He doesn't seem to want to create a giant game anymore and is ok with just riding it out for us old players until it ultimately runs its course and dies.
Personally I prefer that to turning it into something like War Thunder.
As far as advertising saving us all, when the game went on Steam, 40k people downloaded and installed over a period of a couple months. I want to say something like 200 subbed for a month. There was no noticeable increase in players with 40k going through over that time.
Wiley.
