I am gonna be bold here and just say that the game lacks real objectives and a proper teaching.
No story
The game lacks story that can be played with simple dialogs to give you quest from time to time again. This means after doing the "tutorial" the game offers, you are free to do whatever you want. I ended up just building up things with no real goal in mind on why I am building up. Mostly just to get more money to get more voodoo to fight those who attack me or I hate. Becoming more like a idle game, with voodoo fights in between.
No proper teaching to new players
The "tutorial" the game offered me at the start didn't really help. I did end up doing them, and they do teach you things. But a few of the newer players that I know of that stayed on the game all told me that they don't really know how the game works even after doing the tutorial, they have no know how on how voodoo worked, and didn't know the ways to make money. I had the same problem at the start, can't say the same for others. Whenever I had problems back then, without the help of the guilds teaching. Most people can't really go and decide to play solo, or loner like most other games would allow. Even when you have problems the game just tells you to go to the help forum and ask. And at that time, I don't even know where the help forum is.
This two things are important things that usually contributed to why people usually don't play the game anymore. People not having a clue to how to play, or having nothing to do after the tutorial.
Now, don't go and say, that the new players just gotta git gud or some sh*t. This is both problems that are quite clear a problem to me that made the players usually leaving the game. This problems are also contributed due to the fact that the game doesn't make things clear on quite a lot of things, voodoo description that lacks real details on it's certain effects, how ship damage are calculated...and stuff.