After significant chatting in the discord, I'd like to say a few more things. And by a 'few', I mean kind of a lot, naturally. 
Let's talk about the payment model.
I agree with what's been said about your current pay-to-play model. It's lenient and fair, and works for people with weird schedules, and especially for people who play a game every day for two weeks in a row and then burn out and don't play for a year... although that might just be me!
Anyway...
Could you reconsider selling the single-payer as it's own game?
I ask only because you've said repeatedly that the singleplayer game doesn't hold up on its own, that you want to give it away for free, ect. I would certainly agree, to an extent, that multiplayer adds a lot of value, but I've actually spent a majority of my time playing more or less alone. The universe is vast, and the only interactions with others that I really ever had was mooching off of Dean, and Mortius joining me to crash your ship on a moon. Other than that, I did my own thing even during the wild west of the free to play days, and I really enjoyed it.
I think you're selling yourself short when you say the game doesn't hold up in singleplayer. Hazeron is great, even when isolated! Like, for real, I know we've been talking about the flaws a lot in this thread, and things to work on, but I genuinely feel that Hazeron is one of the most impressive games ever made. To say it has 'limited play value' by itself is underselling it by a long shot. And I know we've all been talking about the graphics, but... that's because we're all very invested in it's success, too. We love this game, and we're all very firm believers that it deserves to be out there and deserves a spotlight. The graphics are not flawed, they're just humble - the market is the one with flaws, with hyperrealistic, 100-gigabytes-of-grass-textures garbage being produced for millions of dollars because that's what the industry wants to prioritize for no good reason. Even in singleplayer, Hazeron has more value as a game than most.
Also... and this is a total, like, complete worst-case scenario, and Vectorus made a whole thread about it so this really should be there whoops,, but having a slightly more functional singleplayer sold on its own (potentially with the possibility of co-op) would ensure the game lives on forever, should you be unable to host the servers yourself. Many games with extensive multiplayer features, like Minecraft, Space Engineers, Terraria, ect, actually work on this model alone, and while I think the idea of a shared permanent universe is super cool and intriguing, this could always be an alternative! Especially if you sold it along side the server subscription, so that perhaps people would have their own singleplayer worlds in conjunction with joining the multiplayer to see their friends and help out their empires. People would essentially be purchasing the Base Game once, and then purchasing months whenever they wanted, giving you money up-front as well as continuously. This is just an idea, though! I'm not suggesting you totally change your MMO to a singleplayer one, that would be ridiculous. It would be a nice option, however.
And to solve the whole 'checking whether it runs' and 'seeing the graphics in-person' problems, a smaller (maybe limited to the first planet, no ships, ect) demo version would work! Making the entire launcher free might be ideal, considering that you wouldn't want to discourage people from creating buildings/ships even when they don't have months bought.
So, now, about the server costs and big empires:
It's not exactly a secret that the server costs of individual players... vary. Not to name any names, but SOME of us just like to have a couple cities, and not one thousand. Mortius said himself that the best way to become strong in the game is by having hundreds of clusters of cities so far apart that they're practically their own empires, thus making it impossible to topple the whole empire by taking down any one piece. Both from a balance perspective and a cost perspective, incentivizing empires to spread out like this isn't super great. For you to keep the current universe around, you need to make larger empires like Weltreich stand any chance of being defeated, and I think a possible solution (although definitely not the only solution!) would be to incentivize fewer, but stronger cities. This would also make the newer buildings more worth it, whereas right now spending dozens of hours prettying up a single city isn't a very efficient use of time. (Sorry, Vectorus! They are very pretty, though!) Overall, reducing the amount of players who want to create thousands of costly cities would be good for everyone.
A key part of any sci-fi rebellion is taking down empires by cutting off 'key supply chains', or what have you. In a fewer-cities system, taking down a single city would actually mean something. Right now, if you destroy a city, it'll take Mortius the same amount of time to make, like, two new ones, which are all basically just as good. You could probably blow up his capitol and he wouldn't care *that* much, because he can always just make a new one very quickly. I'm not suggesting you should make it take longer to make functioning cities - that just sounds tedious - but I think there should be more benefit to having larger, older, and stronger cities, and less benefit to having many smaller ones. This could be implemented through many different types of systems and adjustments to current systems. I'll admit that the year-long Quality system was sort of like this, but I really think there's better ways than doing that, especially since it didn't matter *too* much and wasn't very controllable.
Moving on, I'm totally cool with you getting rid of the old-style cities and such, that sounds great. I'm biased, due to my lack of... any sort of permanence, since I usually just go around crashing Dean's ships. But I certainly won't mind.
However, it does bring me to what I feel like is still a significant problem...
Don't get me wrong; the ship and building designers are incredible. They really are! I didn't know anything about modelling, but for me that was fine - I'm always happy to learn new things, and I really did learn how to 3d model from it! Moving into Blender was a cinch! I'd even say the in-game ship/building creator is probably the most powerful one seen in any game to date, just in terms of what you can DO. Then again, I'm also the kind of person who loves the concept of Geocities/Neocities, for forcing you to learn HTML(/CSS/Javascript).
And while it is incredible, it's also the part of the game with the biggest barrier to entry. I know we moved past this problem months ago, but I think it's still worth talking about.
You can get around having to make better graphics, you can maybe get around not having a tutorial yet (I certainly never bothered looking one up), and you can certainly let casual players just use blueprints made by others, but as games like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet, and... I dunno, TF2, have shown, people love to create!
As it is, it's incredibly involved, far too involved for a casual player. Like, the game gave me the skills necessary to, for example, romhack Mario 64, because it is pretty much just as involved as romhacking for Mario 64 is, which isn't the best compliment. Sure, lots of people out there can 3d model, but probably a hundred times as many can't, and won't want to watch a dozen tutorials. The old ship builder was limited, but it was also beautifully simple and fun, and one of the easiest and most intuitive parts of the game. As much as I love the new designer, I would really suggest you consider re-implementing a version of that as an optional 'basic' ship-builder, even if it doesn't involve rooms nearly as much as the original and is just an easier way to create a model/room voids/ect to then tinker with manually and use with the normal new-style volume system. Letting people tinker with the ship's volumes and such without having to create a new one would be ideal too, but forgive me if that's already been implemented, I haven't played in a few months.
I also don't know if you intend on integrating the blueprints with Steam Workshop, but their tagging, rating, and search systems are stellar. Plus, people are familiar with them. Anyway, it just seems like a convenient system that new audiences will likely be familiar with.
Finally, I want to say thanks for taking our feedback into account, Haxus, or at least giving us the time of day even if we're all totally wrong. Many developers will leave their games' fanbases in silent confusion, worrying what will happen next with their properties. (Cube World, anyone remember that one?) You've been nothing but upfront about all of this Steam business, and time and time again you've shown you value your fans. We all really appreciate that, man! I wish you good luck with all of the Steam stuff, and I think you can pull through with Hazeron on top, no matter what you decide to do!
Let's talk about the payment model.
I agree with what's been said about your current pay-to-play model. It's lenient and fair, and works for people with weird schedules, and especially for people who play a game every day for two weeks in a row and then burn out and don't play for a year... although that might just be me!
Anyway...
Could you reconsider selling the single-payer as it's own game?
I ask only because you've said repeatedly that the singleplayer game doesn't hold up on its own, that you want to give it away for free, ect. I would certainly agree, to an extent, that multiplayer adds a lot of value, but I've actually spent a majority of my time playing more or less alone. The universe is vast, and the only interactions with others that I really ever had was mooching off of Dean, and Mortius joining me to crash your ship on a moon. Other than that, I did my own thing even during the wild west of the free to play days, and I really enjoyed it.
I think you're selling yourself short when you say the game doesn't hold up in singleplayer. Hazeron is great, even when isolated! Like, for real, I know we've been talking about the flaws a lot in this thread, and things to work on, but I genuinely feel that Hazeron is one of the most impressive games ever made. To say it has 'limited play value' by itself is underselling it by a long shot. And I know we've all been talking about the graphics, but... that's because we're all very invested in it's success, too. We love this game, and we're all very firm believers that it deserves to be out there and deserves a spotlight. The graphics are not flawed, they're just humble - the market is the one with flaws, with hyperrealistic, 100-gigabytes-of-grass-textures garbage being produced for millions of dollars because that's what the industry wants to prioritize for no good reason. Even in singleplayer, Hazeron has more value as a game than most.
Also... and this is a total, like, complete worst-case scenario, and Vectorus made a whole thread about it so this really should be there whoops,, but having a slightly more functional singleplayer sold on its own (potentially with the possibility of co-op) would ensure the game lives on forever, should you be unable to host the servers yourself. Many games with extensive multiplayer features, like Minecraft, Space Engineers, Terraria, ect, actually work on this model alone, and while I think the idea of a shared permanent universe is super cool and intriguing, this could always be an alternative! Especially if you sold it along side the server subscription, so that perhaps people would have their own singleplayer worlds in conjunction with joining the multiplayer to see their friends and help out their empires. People would essentially be purchasing the Base Game once, and then purchasing months whenever they wanted, giving you money up-front as well as continuously. This is just an idea, though! I'm not suggesting you totally change your MMO to a singleplayer one, that would be ridiculous. It would be a nice option, however.
And to solve the whole 'checking whether it runs' and 'seeing the graphics in-person' problems, a smaller (maybe limited to the first planet, no ships, ect) demo version would work! Making the entire launcher free might be ideal, considering that you wouldn't want to discourage people from creating buildings/ships even when they don't have months bought.
So, now, about the server costs and big empires:
It's not exactly a secret that the server costs of individual players... vary. Not to name any names, but SOME of us just like to have a couple cities, and not one thousand. Mortius said himself that the best way to become strong in the game is by having hundreds of clusters of cities so far apart that they're practically their own empires, thus making it impossible to topple the whole empire by taking down any one piece. Both from a balance perspective and a cost perspective, incentivizing empires to spread out like this isn't super great. For you to keep the current universe around, you need to make larger empires like Weltreich stand any chance of being defeated, and I think a possible solution (although definitely not the only solution!) would be to incentivize fewer, but stronger cities. This would also make the newer buildings more worth it, whereas right now spending dozens of hours prettying up a single city isn't a very efficient use of time. (Sorry, Vectorus! They are very pretty, though!) Overall, reducing the amount of players who want to create thousands of costly cities would be good for everyone.
A key part of any sci-fi rebellion is taking down empires by cutting off 'key supply chains', or what have you. In a fewer-cities system, taking down a single city would actually mean something. Right now, if you destroy a city, it'll take Mortius the same amount of time to make, like, two new ones, which are all basically just as good. You could probably blow up his capitol and he wouldn't care *that* much, because he can always just make a new one very quickly. I'm not suggesting you should make it take longer to make functioning cities - that just sounds tedious - but I think there should be more benefit to having larger, older, and stronger cities, and less benefit to having many smaller ones. This could be implemented through many different types of systems and adjustments to current systems. I'll admit that the year-long Quality system was sort of like this, but I really think there's better ways than doing that, especially since it didn't matter *too* much and wasn't very controllable.
Moving on, I'm totally cool with you getting rid of the old-style cities and such, that sounds great. I'm biased, due to my lack of... any sort of permanence, since I usually just go around crashing Dean's ships. But I certainly won't mind.
However, it does bring me to what I feel like is still a significant problem...
Don't get me wrong; the ship and building designers are incredible. They really are! I didn't know anything about modelling, but for me that was fine - I'm always happy to learn new things, and I really did learn how to 3d model from it! Moving into Blender was a cinch! I'd even say the in-game ship/building creator is probably the most powerful one seen in any game to date, just in terms of what you can DO. Then again, I'm also the kind of person who loves the concept of Geocities/Neocities, for forcing you to learn HTML(/CSS/Javascript).
And while it is incredible, it's also the part of the game with the biggest barrier to entry. I know we moved past this problem months ago, but I think it's still worth talking about.
You can get around having to make better graphics, you can maybe get around not having a tutorial yet (I certainly never bothered looking one up), and you can certainly let casual players just use blueprints made by others, but as games like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet, and... I dunno, TF2, have shown, people love to create!
As it is, it's incredibly involved, far too involved for a casual player. Like, the game gave me the skills necessary to, for example, romhack Mario 64, because it is pretty much just as involved as romhacking for Mario 64 is, which isn't the best compliment. Sure, lots of people out there can 3d model, but probably a hundred times as many can't, and won't want to watch a dozen tutorials. The old ship builder was limited, but it was also beautifully simple and fun, and one of the easiest and most intuitive parts of the game. As much as I love the new designer, I would really suggest you consider re-implementing a version of that as an optional 'basic' ship-builder, even if it doesn't involve rooms nearly as much as the original and is just an easier way to create a model/room voids/ect to then tinker with manually and use with the normal new-style volume system. Letting people tinker with the ship's volumes and such without having to create a new one would be ideal too, but forgive me if that's already been implemented, I haven't played in a few months.
I also don't know if you intend on integrating the blueprints with Steam Workshop, but their tagging, rating, and search systems are stellar. Plus, people are familiar with them. Anyway, it just seems like a convenient system that new audiences will likely be familiar with.
Finally, I want to say thanks for taking our feedback into account, Haxus, or at least giving us the time of day even if we're all totally wrong. Many developers will leave their games' fanbases in silent confusion, worrying what will happen next with their properties. (Cube World, anyone remember that one?) You've been nothing but upfront about all of this Steam business, and time and time again you've shown you value your fans. We all really appreciate that, man! I wish you good luck with all of the Steam stuff, and I think you can pull through with Hazeron on top, no matter what you decide to do!