[mwatt]

(Quote taken from Pasi's post about G.O.D.)

"The majority of the playerbase was basically confined to a few really shitty instances simply because they didn't have the gear to progress. If you look back at this time, you'll see most of the 'old uber' guilds died off around this time and there was a changing of the guard of top dog guilds."

^ This, especially the italics (I added). This is what caused the "death" of the game: bifurcation of the player-base. The problem was initiated in PoP, with all the keying and locking of casuals out of many many zones that they helped pay for, and with all the loss of equipment that went hand in hand.