I can't be bothered to read the rest of the thread but I'll lay my thoughts out. Ultima's decline ultimately boils down to how the server is managed by Larva. It's not OP weapons or any custom stuff, I believe there's an audience for that but it isn't fulfilled by Ultima. It's the silly stuff like PGF being available one month out of the year. It's needing 80 hit just to hit certain enemies, therefore encouraging people to donate. It's the lack of any kind of change to better this server and has just be in the same state it was 3-4 years ago. It's events always starting almost a month late sometimes. It's toxic people, or even worse(such as pedophiles and conspiracy theorists),getting warned 10 times instead of being banned. It's the happy hour system that only encourages playing in 3 hour bursts instead of more often. It's the lack of anything to encourage people to play outside events, since most things worth using are event online. As a (ex)player, it's just obvious there's hardly any effort being put into this server anymore and it'll stay declining in population until there's an effort put forth by Larva to actually listen to his player base and admins who play this game to improve this server. As someone who's probably played close to 20,000 hours, I don't want to see this server die off. I would love to see this server alive again, but just letting it idle isn't going to fix anything.
We can complain all we want but ultimately there's little we can do as players. You'd think having your server dwindle down to 10-20 players online would be enough of a kick in the pants to change something but apparently not. Ultima's problem ultimately dwindles down to Larva's inaction to change anything within the server. This isn't a hate post aimed at Larva, it's just stating facts from someone who's put entirely too much time into this game.