No, the game wasn't "almost completely dead" before the edge changes in December 2014, IDK where you get this from. I was playing two characters at the time and was routinely logging in to more than 30 players online, at prime US times. Moreover, mudstats shows an _average_ for that period of more than 15 people online.
Nevertheless, arguing against somebody's personal impressions (or worse, memories) isn't really the best way to see this. Rather, I like to think that the edge changes started a cascading process (with second and third order effects that the IMMs didn't seem to worry about at all at the time) which caused CF to cross a cost-benefit threshold for a lot of players, that made it not worth playing.

This happened for me and most of the people I was playing with. End result: We don't play anymore because the current CF is very different to the CF we enjoyed playing for years. Rephrasing this, _too many changes_ that ####ed with _too many enjoyable aspects_ of the game happened in a short period of time, without taking feedback from the playerbase into account. If I had to summarize all of these (detrimental) changes I would say that they took away from players being able to customize and experiment with different builds *on their own* but also
feel like they're making progress towards *something*, character-wise, again *on their own*. It felt great knowing I could log onto the game, at any time, go hunt some enemies (or explore or look at things) and get some points that would let me further extend my character, without any immortal needing to be present to reward me. So, certain people may have taken this to extremes. So really what is the major problem here? CF was always a cutthroat environment and these sort of behaviors make the game better in my view, not worse. The mistaken view that the IMMs had about attracting new players to the game by making it more forgiving has, I think by now, entirely collapsed.

PK edge points were great because they constantly introduced strife and gave people multiple incentives, with the only barrier being their PK prowess. The moment you go in and start trying to police what you see as unacceptable behavior (multikilling for edge farming, obs/exp point farming with scripts) you risk destroying parts of CF that made it self-perpetuating and addictive. At the end of the day, removing these behaviors you so vehemently wanted to regulate against, did not introduce counterweights to the far-more enjoyable aspects of the game that you took away.

You can only #### so much with a homeostatic process before unbalancing it, especially if negative feedback is not introduced into the circuit. And that's the gist of the issue in my view. Repeated IMM posts have painted an image of a shared vision for the game amongst the staff. Vision = ideology. This is fine as long as that ideology does not go against reality, which is cybernetics. Reality rules and if you desperately try to hold on to your vision, you will be eaten by hungry tiger in the jungle.

To end on a positive note, here is a suggestion that builds on everything I've written here before (I'm assuming simply going back to how things were is not an option): Remove all edge point rewards, give every player a certain number of edge points *starting at character creation and progressing at regular level intervals* and let them spend them as they see fit. Don't you think that would be the ultimate incentive to get players back? Would it be as good as the old system? Probably not since it's very sterile. The old system was special sauce, even if flawed. Another reason not to #### with whatever magic you have that you know works.

Additionally, maybe somebody can email Daevryn and Ray and beg them to come back. Nep can cheat his ass off 24/7 for all I care and Ray can reward her followers (and only them) until the cows come home. Strife = good.