Most of the balance issues were present during the heyday of cRPG, when the servers were the fullest they've ever been, in much worse manner even. Balance issues are endemic to multiplayer games. DTV server being fuller than any other is something that was still happening after the supposed killingblow changes. Strategus is a side-show and completely irrelevant to cRPG playerbase. The players who played purely for Strategus were seldom on servers.
Siege was always way smaller than battle, and it started depopulating just as battle also experienced a downturn. It was mod-wide, and while 5-10 people can still play battle, the minimum for an enjoyable match on a siege map was usually much higher (depending on map). That's what made siege server more vulnerable imo. The map rotation was always complained about, constantly, in every single iteration of cRPG, same as balance changes.
A lot of these may have been factors in falling population, but none of them killed it. Playerbase could've bounced back as it had many times before, and as other mods can clearly manage. Once it was weakened enough is when the rott set in and the trolls were proportionally great enough that they had an increasing effect, that I agree with. Find it pretty funny how on one hand you try to minimize the role of krems and their sort in killing the mod while simultaneously accepting that their shit-tier trolling was much more effective once the playerbase was smaller, so much so that they even constituted the "majority" in your eyes. And the population has just kept falling ever since. Krems are a symptom of terminal cancer, tumours that show up and grow unchecked once vitality has left, and instead of getting chemo the devs/admins basically started chain-smoking unfiltereds and x-raying themselves for fun. There had always been a healthy playerbase despite a few trolls here and there, so nothing to worry about.
ps: chadz would be the worst fucking admin ever.
