Salamander has gone through many, many things. If you want a good summary, you can read my previous comments about it here.
TL:DR: Mander goes through a player cycle.
About every few months, the population that’s there slowly gets fed up in some way, shape, form or fashion. Maybe they’re tired that the playerbase is declining in RP quality. Maybe it’s just the lack of content. Maybe their friends or whatever aren’t there anymore. Maybe they don’t enjoy MRP anymore. The short of it, is that players generally just leave after a long time, and a new population comes in and replaces that.
Players go everywhere. Some decide that MRP isn’t for them, and embrace LRP chaos like Goobstation or otherwise. Some fall even deeper in love with roleplay, and move towards HRP forks like Cosmatic Drift and Sector Umbra. Some decide that maybe SS14’s base gameplay isn’t for them, and they move to forks like Frontier Station, Monolith, or RMC-14. Some think that Mander’s community is just really bad, and they move towards more tightly-knitted communities like Harmony or Moffstation. And of course there’s everyone in between that decides to bounce around between everywhere.
I call it the cosine wave of Mander. I remember the days when Mander was around 30-50 players (the sweet spot as I’ve said before) around 9-12 PM PST. Then it was literally always full at 80/80. And now it’s deadpop at times.
I’ve always stuck behind whenever a playerbase exodus happened. It’s starting to get pretty predictable as to what happens. I’ve just generally accepted it as the circle of life.
Usually new players would fill the pool, however whitelist applications are being picked up after the primary admin that was doing them went on vacation. Though I suspect that roleplay quality will drop when that hits, as there’s not really any huge veteran players on there persistently as of right now.
I can generally show you the state of popularity Mander’s been.
Here’s the past week of mander playcount:
The past week, about 3 months ago (notice how there’s more bulk in the graph around when everyone plays mid-day):
And about mid-december of last year:
Unfortunately the data literally ends there so I can’t show you how it was like around Apr 2024.
But generally, it follows a loop.