Well ok...

jumpgate always was mmorpg and will remain but i doubt that jge will be as realistic as the old jg
the graphics were never important in jg... the game never was able to mess with other games this way
the interesting part was the giant universe... the massive rp elements... extreme high difficulty and the gameplay realism

imagine you have a freighter... you fill it with iridium (which has a high mass) then you launch from a station
you will notive that mass has a very high effect in that game when you try to get you ship on speed (a normal ship empty will get on speed in just a few seconds, a full freighter -> tow did need about 20 minutes to get on full speed with a full load of iridium)
in the same way mass has high effect on speeding up you also will need about 20 mins to slow down
you can turn your ship while flying... but your course will remain due to the mass in movement

flying through pirate space (which was my speciality) was extremly risky - while being halfway protected in octavian, quantar or solrain space there were no laws in pirate or uncontrolled sectors
fighting in a empty tow... close to impossible (except you are female and your callsign is angel... but that is a looooonnnggg story)
fighting in a full tow .... you can press the red button and blow urself up instead of wasting time or you better hand over some money and hope that today is your lucky day
why did i do such high risk trade runs? money!!!! and the fact that pirates ignored me after one of them tried to tax me while i was flying a medium fighter with no guns (i was just on the way to buy them)... and then the whole situation turned into some kind of race through 8 pirate systems while i had like i already mentioned no guns, no good shields, no good ship and was somewhat slower... the pirate tried to tax me about 30 times and got back 30 "no's" while i was jumping from one system to another and then back to the original system and then again back to the next system just to let my shields reload... the rest was just surviving open space with heavy gunfire from behind trying to get not hit too much
that took about 4 hours and from that day i didnt see a pirate taxing me again

what else can be said... fighting is different then anything else you have experience
if you ever watched apollo 13 then you know how the movement in space does work and that makes fighting a bit harder...
the normal hit rates were about 10%... projectile weapons had even less hit ratio
I prefered to stay out of big fights and went on conflux hunts with laser guns (which were less effective than projectiles) but i considered it more a targeting practice for starlancer at that time
somehow i managed to get a hit ratio of 52% which placed me on upper part the top100 fighters but in a massive fight i wouldnt have had a big chance due to the choice of my weapons

50% of all kills were because of:
1. noobs learning how to dock at a station (here you need to understand that mass again plays a big role... that you have to fly into a docking tube manually... that you need to have to avoid getting into this tube too fast and that you should prevent to get in contact with the walls of that tube)
2. due to semi-experienced fighter pilots which tried to do trader jobs with a tow full of iridium and having the wish to dock at a station while being much too fast due to the mass
3. due to experienced pilots being hunted and trying to fast dock by sliding into the docking bay (which really needs some skill)
4. docking experienced players which have the skills to slide into a docking bay but forgot that other players might use this docking bay to launch from that station in that same moment

another 20% of the kills in jg were done by emma
there was even an emma fan club
explaination: emma was a big black asteroid in a system between quantar space and hyperial space; emma unfortunatly was directly between two jumpgates a few meters above the direct line between those gates
the chance to crash into that rock was BIG if you didnt know where exactly it is or if you didnt choose a different route around it

the other 30% are due to conflux or pvp

there are 3 playable races
octavia (warriors)
solrain (corrupt ppl... dunno how else i should describe it)
quantar (miners)

there were 2 additional races
hyperial
armananth
but nobody really knew what they are... there were many roleplay stories about them.... if i remember right the stations were known to be high technology but nobody ever did see how these raced did look like because visitors were only allowed to use specific parts of it

and there was one big enemy race called conflux
players either called them flux or gayfishes
they used pink organic ships which attacked EVERYTHING
higher lvl flux such as the ael did even sing (it was similar to whale sounds)... reason is not really known to me... but i think it was to warn low lvl players to get their ass out of that system ASAP
the way those ships appeared in space was based on the lvl of the player and its destination
most of the low lvl players (up to lvl 40) did never see a high lvl flux or only if other players were already busy killing that one... some areas were known to be infected by flux while in others were only lvl 1 squidies or max lvl 5 yellyfishes.

fighting and flying is interesting especially when you get killed
you have an insurance covering the costs of the lost ship.... when you die the first time you get 100% money back... when you die the 2nd time you get about 99% back.... the more you die the less you get back which made survival essential for that game
of course the insurance rates were able to raise again but that depened on the time you have spend in space without getting killed
needless to say that once you did die you had to rebuy all equipment... and if you had special equipment it took hours to travel to the places where you could by it
due to the dynamic market you also had the risk that the equipment is not available anymore and need to produced again

there were different jobs you could do in jg
trading... for free or by mission
scanning objects
patroling
bounty hunts (if a player violated laws)
mining (rock sucking)

basically the missions were not much important since players were usually after special stuff
like getting medals... scroll down to my signature and you see some of them
this is basically just a small amount of possible medals since i didnt really have much time to play the game
there were medals for everying... for the first successful docking... for the first time leaving the starting system... for the first kill ... for the first conflux kill ... for having good reputations with a faction... for mining... for trading.... for getting killed (yes there were shame marks... i also got some but that cant be avoided -> the small red ones)....

there also were artifacts in the game... but i dont think that many players found them since they were usually far outside the known map.... and you had to search for days/weeks to find them with much luck
not to mention that far outside the maps the concentration of high lvl conflux was much higher so often clans were searching for artifacts together (which was very good for the teamplay)

of course there were clans
my clan was called ~dieFreexXx~... there were not many members, XL was coleader... while he was concentrated on fighting conflux i was mostly busy playing mentor teaching others how the game is played and how they dont crash into something