DM has lately gone through a fairly major reworking that could've caused a lot of players to leave, but you know what? It's actually caused old players who hadn't played for months or years to start playing again. Here's why.
Recently it had come to the attention of creators that certain players were heinously cheating, so they launched a big investigation and sitebanned several people over the course of a few days. One of the cheaters then decided that if he was gonna get sitebanned, he might as well go out with a bang, so he ran around killing everyone he could first.
The mud was subsequently closed to players for a day or so, while the creators sitebanned the rest of the cheaters and decided what to do with the ones who were killed by the mainiac. Someone on our board asked for an official reason, so the creators decided to post a notice on the mud when you tried to log in that a comet had hit the world, thus explaining why players couldn't log in. I don't know if this comet thing was something they were gonna do anyway or if it was just a spur of the moment IC excuse created after someone asked about it.
When the mud came back up, everything was changed. Not only were about 20 chars deleted, but all the people killed just before were suddenly supposed to have been killed by the comet instead of the maniac, and it was up to the other players to figure out where they'd been buried and rescue them. The city that had existed since the mud began and was the general populace's main hangout was suddenly no more, and half the castles were destroyed as well. Some of the quests were buried in rubble, and once-verdant plains were now wastelands. Smoke filled the air and made farming almost impossible, and instabilities in the earth caused by the comet made mining harder and more dangerous. A plot involving the saving of the earth from the ravages of the comet was started, and many players spent days trying to accomplish probably the biggest quest-type thing in the mud's history.
Many people at first whined about how everything was different, and how this or that sucked. But you know what? We've had the highest amount of players online since the rampage of the vampire some months ago. Current players have become more excited about playing, and old players who'd stopped playing have decided to come back now that the cheaters are gone to see what all the new stuff is like. And the creators still have many many ideas for new things to add or change.
DM could've easily been ruined by the cheaters, but with these new developments I think it's safe to say that it was reborn from the ashes produced by the comet, heh.
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