If I knew I would see Wrath, Sam, NBM, Yhorian, Balrahd, Frosty, Marcus & Kostyan (cause I love fighting some of the best pkers ever) and a host of other really great players playing the game how I know they can based on their past characters (in both RP and PK senses) every time I rolled a character I would have never stopped playing.
After Jindicho I haven't seen you with the same level of char. Char got shafted by Cyradia, no question, but ever since you've not been the player you were. And many players just can't get past what happened to their past characters. It's our own hang ups about playing that stop us, not the Imms. My own is the playerbase itself that remains, and a bit of the monotony of CF has certainly not helped (every game you play for so long will have tedium to a degree though).
I miss being in Thera around the types of characters that made me want to raise my game and improve, both in RP and PK.
Now, in the last two years I played I feel like I'm one of the people trying to get other people to raise theirs. If only to make it more enjoyable for me to play.

But people don't seem to want that as much as they want the spoon for free now. People want easy inducts. They want all their info handed to them. See, the PB is so low, so why make it hard to do things? I argue the opposite. Players take things for granted when they are so easily given. And you just as easily discard and start anew when you have no investment necessary to get somewhere in CF. You eliminate all the challenges from CF, you're left with boring old repetetive predictable PK. That alone doesn't hold a player's interest for long.
Those are not players that engender CF to me either.
A tell saying what's the phrase, or password or walkthrough to area such and such is really off putting to me.
People used to put effort into learning and getting to a level of notoriety.
My best character ever was actually Thendrell, because I learned, and I managed to get three virtues and be the first evdr player to get Ysal's full tattoo. It was a long and tough road to get there, but I can look back and feel like I never had so much fun or learned so mch with any other character.
Maybe some people don't want to bring that effort anymore for lack of time, but I always believed the environment of CF was richer for the efforts mortals put into it. 100 players doesn't mean shit to me if they are all just going through the motions of RP because all they care for is PK.

I'd take 10 Ghrimriddors in CF over 100 Lohakahns..