Only a couple of the demigod fighters were Mags, the rest just kind of bailed slowly for various reasons. Bit of a snowball effect going on too.

Yep. Shuyin leaves -> Serenwilde is weaker -> all the Mags leave -> Serenwilde is even weaker -> people get tired of having no combatants in their org -> Serenwilde gets even weaker and so on.

More than other nations, Serenwilde also always had a larger proportion of people with less interest in combat. They were enough to add up to a zerg in village influences and sometimes could be parleyed into a zerg in fights by sheer numbers, but that's as much combat as they'd like. As combat became a more all-consuming part of the game, many of those people faded away, and with them, all culture activities and most guild-focused activities dropped off, which encouraged more of them to fade away, etc. Meanwhile, the death spiral Zenon mentions was happening in parallel, so it was a double-self-reinforcing cycle of decline.

I found better things to do.

Though I guess 'better' is pretty subjective.

It's definitely true that combat has consumed much of the game, or at least from what I've heard of how things were. When I first started playing it became painfully apparent that if I wasn't a fighter, I would be ignored for the most part. Seren seemed to have little time for anything else, including nurturing young people who had other interests or talents that did not involve being really good at fighting.

While it sucks to be at the bottom right now and be tempted every now and then to flee, I'm more partial to being a part of the underdog that rises over joining in on the already greats. I'll just envy them from here.

I agree, it's the best feeling in the world to know that you helped build your org up.

I LOVE SERENWILDE! Well, maybe it's just the recent politics changes and events that have dragged me back, but still!



Then come back to the underdog organisation!

But yeah, it's a nice feeling. Like that most recent Rockholm revolt

's why I keep playing the Serenguard, I feel like I have accomplished something there.

Oh, yeah, Sojiro? Come back to Seren and build it back up with us.

Shuyin is not allowed to leave until I am demi.

(He's still not allowed after that tho)

From what I can remember, Seren died because of over-reaching itself insofar as combat's concerned. There's only a certain amount of getting beaten into the mud people are willing to put up with before they bail.

It could also be the fact that players have been called away by Real Life, due to the fact that Lusternia is a very demanding game. You simply can't expect to have an involved position in your org without being around every day, sometimes for most of the day, and a lot of people simply can't give that amount of time. The more people leave, the fewer there are to interact with for the ones who're left, and the less incentive they have to stay around. Of course, that's true of Lusternia in general.

Anyway, just rambling. Carry on please!

I keep hearing that people don't like the current political climate in Serenwilde.

If that's true, then there are ways to fix that!

Contest! People don't hold offices without being voted for in the first place!

Ministers do

I don't think the current political climate is notably worse than at many times in the past five years when Serenwilde was nearly always at least in the game. Nor do I think there's any particular reason why Aramel's reasons are more applicable to Serenwilde now than at other times.

It's all about momentum. Lose too many people and it makes you lose more people. Critical masses go both ways. Serenwilde got hit harder than other nations by the Forever War because Serenwilde always had its zerg quantities rounded out by people not especially into war, but willing to endure a little bit of it as long as they had the other stuff too. When the other stuff started to fade out, people started to fade out or leave, and that made even more people fade out or leave. And then that started meaning that in the Forever War, Serenwilde started to get trounced, which made the rate of departures and fading-away increase even faster. Serenwilde's capabilities in war have almost always been at least as dependent on large numbers of not-very-good zerg members as it has been on good combatants, and it was losing both: the zergs because the other stuff that kept them around were leaving, and the combatants because most of them tend to go to the winning side.

That kind of runaway vicious cycle can only be countered by something getting its opposite started and keeping it going long enough to get the momentum to the critical self-sustaining point. A few people saying "I'm going to host a festival even if no one comes!" is not going to do that. Neither is a few people contesting political leadership positions. Political shifts might help, depending on the mean time between betrayals. But in the end, when it happens, a thousand things will be given credit, and no one of them will really have been responsible. At best, some of them will have helped create the circumstances for the recovery, and more of them will have had nothing to do with it but will simply have happened at the right time and be very noticeable, and thus get all the credit/blame anyway.