I will not pretend to understand the gaming industry or what makes CF tick or not tick as well as many of you.

I will give you feedback from the side of one player - me. And it's this - the low player count is a killer. An absolute killer. As someone who historically has favored exploration based characters and tends to focus on the "support role", there is little for me to do when no one is around. It makes it difficult to interact, difficult to RP and ultimately difficult to choose to devote a lot of time to CF. Logging on to make a new char in prime hours and seeing 5-10 players online is soul crushing. Plain and simple. (It's way worse than a full loot for me!)

In the past, I could justify low(er) player numbers with - well, I'm going to log in and explore a bit on my own. But with exploration/observation points removed, that incentive is less appealing. Are there areas that I've not seen or studied in detail? Sure, but not many. Is there a reason for me to take a new player to Organia and do a true IC/RP walkthrough for hours at a time? Yes - for RP reasons, no - for mechanical reasons. CF without edges is less fun. You could say that this opinion is subjective. I disagree. Perhaps I paraphrase - CF with less content is less fun. There. Isildur provided a number of thought-intensive solutions to the edge problem. So now, with a theoretical solution in place, there is a practical solution - there is no one to code it. (Or rather there are not enough coders.) I sympathize. I wish I could help. I cannot code. I can help fund coding (within reason). I suspect other people could fund it as well (with some accountability of course on the use of funds).

Reading the forums, there is a clear disconnect between the ever-shrinking staff and the ever-shrinking player base. I don't have a solution, though people more vested than me (though I'm also vested) have offered some sound solutions (with most focusing on that four letter word - "edge").

Yes, there have been many "CF is dead" threads in the past, and CF has always come back. I truly hope that's the case with this particularly bad case of malaise because I hope to continue playing CF in the future.