The reason is psychological, not mechanical. All combat in Star citizen comes with the risk of death. Be that PVE or PVP. And for the last 6 years every update adds more and more inconvenience to failure in the form of time sinks. In the past you had a global inventory, no need to ever buy things more than once in the case of armor or under suits. Weapons, only when you had that gun in your hand and were killed did you ever drop it. Setting your respawn point was as simple as requesting landing at a port with respawn ability. Citys, stations, you didn't even have to leave your ship. Claiming that ship was faster, instant even if you paid the fee. Easy to get back into the action. A weekly org event with 20 people didn't require a million auec of gear sets stashed in a ship that may or may not get used. The setbacks were worth the risk and more people were willing to risk the fight because their losses were minimal. And the 6 years since then have stacked more and more penalties on death with ever-diminishing rewards. Also the nature of playing "the bad guy" usually means that you and your group only play to the Meta. A very small group of organized Reds can disrupt or destroy events, hold bottlenecks built in by Cig oversight, and min max their way to victory against less prepared players. And in the rare events they get killed in game and are sent to SPK it's either bugged, easy to escape or someone has an alt banking merits to get that person out again and they're immediately handed all the weapons and ship they just used to go on a murder spree. All of the loss is stacked on the side of the player that doesn't want to fight and so they got really good at running away from fights they have little to no chance of winning. Master modes didn't even the playing field it just removed options, slowed everything to a crawl and forced people who didn't want to fight into situations they can't win. Nobody really likes being the punching bag, content for some wannabe pirate in the system you have made. And they're even more resentful for being forced into it. Players who'd spent years of their free time flying one or two ships they loved found themselves on the short end of the meta and now feel they can't compete with the latest release of overpowered fighter of the month. It all but solidified the game as pay to win. The reason why people stopped fighting is because the time it takes to get back to what they wanted to do is simply too high.