So, one thing that I believe took a large chunk of activity away is the leaderbased kingdom/religion systems.
People promote their friends and favorites and this causes a mix of bad blood. Athorien took a rather large hit and the pbase significantly decreased. The 2-3 people I had encouraged to start playing or come back all went away into thin air as a result.
This has happened in the past and is not one isolated incident.
It would be nice to see
either A ) More strict policies for people to hold ranks IE (logging in at least 10 hrs a week or more etc)
or B ) try to make an accommodating system where everyone has an opportunity to reach top rank and noone 'owns' it.
In fact i'd go as far as to say that the religion system should be looked at differently.
Keep faith points, but you can 'augment' your way up to spells you want, having X amount of spells you can get. And you gain faithpoints by instead of casting spells, you turn in corpses or item drops to an alter in a religion temple.
You could do the same for kingdoms. Make 'resolute' figureheads that spawn and people can fight (like really tough boses) you can't kill them but you can defeat them, for a chance at a chest that contains faithpoints and maybe other stuff.
(if you fight one area long enough you lose faction but the only thing it actually affects is that the arro is aggro to you)
The faction system has really hindered or destroyed grouping opportunities and that doesn't help with smaller PBASE (look for ways to reward people who have awesome faction, and ways to make things slightly more challenging for people without good faction, however you can get to a point where there is no recovery even paying 100,000s of tokens and gold and that isn't fun.