I started playing my freshman year of high school after I overhead some other students discussing a staff of striking in the common area.

About 12-20 people in the school played and it was a very social experience. Things that stand out to me are discovering Camelot and thinking jeweled broadswords were the bees knees.

Over the next decade I continued to play. I went off to college and developed dozens of online cf friends. By the time I graduated the number of people playing in my region had dwindled down to half a dozen as players got jobs/relationships/found other interests.

I saw new classes added, cabal purges, cf go down for several months, wand systems change a bajillion times, he'll opened and closed like a revolving door, new cabals came and went. (Bring back masters :p)

Lots of change happened, some people thought were cool and others folks thought sucked. Some of those sucky changes drove players to take a timeout. But most of them came back eventually.

When I entered the professional world my play time dropped. When I got into a serious relationship it dropped more. Getting a pet dropped it a little. I imagine when a kid comes around my discretionary time per week will only be a few hours and I don't know what kind of priority cf will get but I imagine it might be a bit low.

Over all that time CF had been there as other popular games have waxed and waned. The games chance at capturing the interest of young players that have cell phones and tablets instead of traditional computers is low. Let's also not forget that you have to intentionally enable telnet on most operating systems post 2003. The imms have done a better job of keeping CF online and introducing new content then most products that pay their staff. But content alone can't change the fact that as the player base ages they have more demands in their time and even if you removed the grind (which some players enjoy) year on year both staff and players are going to have less involvement.


Now if they can just hold on another 40 years everyone will be retired and we can get back to 100 players!

My point is, if there is a change you don't like then take a deep breath and get over it. Discuss the game mechanics if you want but attacking the staff for something out of their control is counter productive(and childish)


I want to thank the staff and players for giving me so many years of joy and engagement.