Nerval summed it up perfectly.
Despite all the unwanted changes and backfire, the managers/devs choose not to be receptive and consider suggestions from a community of players who have played this game for a long, long time. Instead, they let players move to another server (evidently) while this one just withers away. Don't see how that could ever be beneficial—at least from a business/profit standpoint even if they don't care about the game itself.
No amount of cosmetic items or spam gamemodes are going to bring back players until the basics are right again. As a simple example: D-stylers have moved to another server for a trivial reason such as the shortened dagger range in v8. They posted about it multiple times on the forum, Jetman even said he'd look into it; but here we are, months later. What do they really gain by not making some XML edits and letting people enjoy their gameplay while increasing the player count a bit? We'll never know.
Players are simply being driven away, which is really sad to see. We're all getting tired of playing with the same set of 20-25 people in every room or CW nowadays. Finding a good room is a struggle. No variety, nothing new; not interesting at all anymore. It's just a matter of time now. Anyhow, this, like most other forum threads in recent months, will probably just get locked and buried without any real responses, as usual...but it'd be nice to be proven wrong for once.
