TL;DR: The reality that needs to be confronted in my opinion is that the playerbase hasn't declined from vitriolic players, cheaters, or "better" alternatives. It has decreased because the game is less fun to play than it used to be.

But as someone who rarely plays anymore, I can honestly say it's not because of the content of the game, it's because of the prioritization of things that have been put in, and how the staff chooses to react to critique.

The problem I'm seeing right now is that the staff appears to be more interested in being right, than making the game better - and they also cater to a crowd that has similar ideas of what's "right". Before, there used to be a much more diverse staff, who were open to different ideas, were more okay with the occasional joke, etc. Nowadays, it's the hammer approach to all dissent, justification of low numbers due to vitriolic playerbase, and any number of other justifications.

The reality that needs to be confronted in my opinion is that the playerbase hasn't declined from vitriolic players, cheaters, or "better" alternatives. It has decreased because the game is less fun to play than it used to be. I haven't found a MUD that is as fun as CF used to be - but I know of plenty of MUDs that are as fun or more fun than CF is *now*.

Being in management, I can point to a few key behaviors that I personally identify with in terms of not wanting to be around them:

1. Lack of transparency or participative decision making.
2. Blame shifting "fun"-ness of the game to vitriolic players, and not the admins responsible for keeping a game fun and playable.
3. Ousting people from staff who represented a large portion of playerbase opinion and preferences through various methods, direct or indirect.

When people don't see transparency or feel like they can participate in what they consider something very dear to them, they cut ties and move on. That's a healthy person's approach to situations like that, in my opinion. Some people stick around, hoping that they can change opinions through words, but that only works when the person in power is legitimately willing to accept constructive criticism on a real level, and not already have their mind made up on the way forward before hearing out the critique.

When blame is shifted to the "vitriolic" players, it bothers me. There were plenty of cheaters, plenty of vitriol, plenty of multikillers, plenty of full looters, and plenty of other douchebaggery through the entire history of CF. That's never gone away, and was part of the fun sometimes. People grow up - that I get, and sure, it's arguable that part of the decline in playerbase is due to different medium for games - but as a person who has an awesome new HTC vive, a pimp as computer, and any number of other avenues for entertainment - CF fulfilled all of the needs I had for a creative outlet, adrenaline rush, relationships, and a number of other aspects of life that I felt a need to have. My personal reason for not sticking around is consistently getting the feeling like I couldn't affect positive change, because my opinion on what positive change was conflicts with the current/at the time crop of imm staff. I can only invest so much emotional effort and hope into something I care about (Like CF), before I have to cut ties and move on.

The last issue from my side of things, aside from the above points, is watching Imm staff that represented my opinions and the things I loved about CF (How they did interactions, what sort of roleplay they fostered, etc) get ousted through political BS, legitimately being unpleasant, leveraging relationships with IMPs, etc. This isn't limited to other Imms - it's been slowly but consistently happening over the last ~10 years. People who disagree with current higher up staff are pushed out the door with a gift bag of "This is your fault" and a letter jacket from "Not my problem" high school. That OOC interaction and watching it over the years has soured my interactions with specific Imms to the point that I legitimately cannot separate my OOC knowledge of their interactions from my IC interactions as a character.