>Recently I have seen the lowest number of players on CF
>consistantly throughout the day and night, since I started
>playing.

I'll agree with you that the numbers lately have seemed low. Then again, the high is still in the upper 70s. I don't have exact numbers, but I think I remember the highs being in the 90s maybe two years ago. So it's not like we've had a "huge" dropoff all of a sudden.

>With the recent deletion of two very loved immortals of CF,
>and the mass exodus of heroimms and lower level immortals,

Mass exodus? As far as I know the success rate for heroimms has always been fairly low. Maybe I'm just misremembering. It seemed like there was a big glut of people who immed near the same time. Lots didn't make it. C'est la vie.

>With newbies
>stumbling on CF, or through this website, or the mud finder
>website, its more like 20% at most.

I think those without benefit of OOC connections enjoy the game for different reasons. When I first started playing there was no AIM or ICQ. There was IRC, but damned if I knew what that was. So I was pretty much on my own. Man did I get kicked around. But I was so newbieish that there was always something in CF that I'd never done, that I still wanted to do. Get a tat. Interact with an imm. Join a cabal. In particular I remember how hard I worked to get into Masters, interviewing with all five Lord Adepts. (And having to somehow acquire the "secret" knowledge of what constitute each of the "Five Magics"). That's the sort of stuff that kept me going.

At some point I discovered the "greater" CF community and began to form relationships with people outside the game. Yet, somehow, I managed to avoid the temptation to perma with them, trade gear with them, or otherwise get smacked down for rules issues. So I don't think the enforcement of these rules is really a big damper on the social aspect of the game. For me, the social aspect is something exists outside the game.


>Massive cabal wars between
>actual RL factions were an every day occurance. On some of the
>immortal goodbye notes, people outline them in a seeminly
>enjoyable fashion. Although they did, at points take away from
>the roleplaying atmosphere, the wars themselves were the
>highpoint of many players.

Yeah, they were great. Unless you weren't part of one of the "RL factions", in which case you were, to a degree, left out of the loop.

>but then one change
>caused massive havoc and terrible repercusions for playing CF
>socially. Cannot interact with that other person without
>REALLY GOOD reasons. Equipment given over same-site but
>different player, for whatever reason, even is roleplaying
>driven, is a no-no, and anti-cheat code alerts and at the
>least, severe warnings are given out to
>deletion/denial/banning. This change, forcing CF into a single
>person "in a dark room in front of a monitor" kind of game has
>ultimately killed CF and its numbers.

Maybe. I'm not convinced. If so, I'm not sure I miss these folks.

>Older players think like I do, as I have talked to a few.
>Those I played with socially confirmed this idea with me when
>I discussed it with them. They won't play anymore. Its too
>tiresome to be summarily deleted because you are grouped with
>a couple friends for violating this "ambigeous rule".

Pardon my lack of sympathy. If you're getting summarily deleted for simply grouping with someone from your same site, then there's got to be a history of abuse from that site. I'm obviously not in a position to comment on rules violations, but as far as I know there's not even a hard rule against grouping with people from your same site. Just don't group with those people exclusively. Course I could be wrong.

>Older players, like me, do not have newer
>player friends to revitalize ourselves on the game, nor do we
>want to introduce "newbie" people to CF out of not only lack
>of desire, lack of wanting to expose them to this place, but
>fear, instilled directly from immortal set out rules.

Personally, I hesitate to introduce new people to the game because everyone I know who doesn't already play CF thinks it's incredibly geeky to play an online text-based fantasy role-playing game. But that's just me.

>What made CF fun was playing with real life
>friends, talking ####, swapping stories, brutalizing each
>other and others.

Nothing prevents you from owning your RL friend on CF then going on AIM to taunt him over it. Obviously the two of you having knowledge of each others' characters would likely be frowned upon, but it's not really something that's enforcible. What is marginally enforicible is monitoring you both to ensure that you treat each other comparably to how you treat other characters. When you kill your RL buddy's character, do you loot him just like you'd loot someone else? Do you and your RL buddy hunt and/or attack each other at least as diligently as you do other characters? etc.

>Your argument of "this is our game and its private property
>and we make the rules, so don't come if you don't want to" is
>viable and great, except for one thing. Alienate too many
>players, and it will be your sandbox, and you and the 14 other
>immortals (if there are that many at that time) can fight each
>other to all content, but that certainly isn't fun.

Neither is interacting with people who are, essentially, cheating. If the choice were between "not playing CF anymore" or "allowing rampant collusion among players in order to prolong CF's existence" then I'm pretty sure the staff would choose the first option. That's a good thing. It means people have principles, not to mention lives outside the game.