I'll admit that, now that I've finally reached level 30, and I already have the only 2 loomed items I've ever wanted (thanks to Garison's poetry contest and my insistence on playing naked) it is really liberating to not give a fuck about Multis. The way they make you fiend for success over fun is really annoying. But that's what's good about strat battles - you get tons of experience, even if you bite it hard.
But about the community tanking so hard...
I wasn't here during this supposed golden age, but I can tell you this - I gave up on multiplayer online games years ago - this is the first one I've come back to since. Why is that? Because people out there were always dicks. I played a bunch of MMOs in highschool, and always came to the same conclusion - "these games are only fun if you play them with friends, and I can't make friends with any of these people, because they're all ignorant immature bigots with nothing better to do than grief their fellow man."
However, there were always shining moments, before that melancholy overcame me and I went back to singleplayer / tabletop games that I could play with my actual RL friends. And those were born of the chosen few who banded together to resist that abysmal tide. I'll freely admit that i haven't yet met that crew in CRPG - do you all mean to tell me that they don't exist? That this has become a wasteland of greedy childish morons, and that I should give up now?
Because saying "Strat killed it", in the past tense, means that it is currently dead.