It's combination of all these things, plus the fact that it seems that everyone who remains aside from me and a pair of others just want to sack it in and start something else.
You ask what's dead about it? Well, the fact that people are trying to start something else kinda says MtG's been abandoned here. If abandonment isn't a sign of death, I'd love to be informed what it does mean.
Rando seems a bit touchy...perhaps he's trying to be a martyr-for-profit with all the labor he's putting into saving the site. Well, I'd be much more impressed if I knew how abandoning MtG for other games saves it. That's like buying a new car to repair an old one.
Yes, as said earlier, I'm bitter. I'm bitter because the CPA isn't about Magic anymore. Why do the current visitors want to go to other games? They aren't (I speak of majority here) Magic players. They're a bunch of other-game players who happened to have all wound up here via previous foray into MtG, and now want to steal the boards. So be it.
They didn't kill the CPA. The CPA was killed by all the ex-Magic players who ditched. And it's not their fault. It's nobody's fault.
The CPA was an experiment. And the experiment has failed. So, dump the remnants down the drain, wash out the test tube, and do something else.
My site is dead. It's been dead for a while. It died when the Magic players left. I'm bitter because I bought the BS. I thought that casual players had a chance at being their own group. Rizzo was right (hyperbolie aside). He was here for two months and he saw what the CPA was and was becoming. And I saw it too, but I screwed up and I bought into the garbage that some people call "hope" or "optimisim." Casuals are exactly the scrubby chaff the tourny players refer to them as. They play for a while, then drift...and drift...until they go away and "branch out" into other games because they made "friends" (i.e. people to argue with) and they need new topics because none of them play MtG anymore. (Any true contacts are maintained over IM, not these boards, anyway.)
As for me...I'll be here today. I might drop in tomorrow or later next week, too. And I'll observe like I have for the last six months, watching, perhaps even "hoping," that something positive will happen. But I doubt it. And probably by this time next year, assuming the CPA as a site still exists, spam and flames will be up 80%, 20% of the regulars will remain, membership count will be up 25% (a good portion single-posts about g4m3 w4r3z requests and people who sign up a dozen times to spam), and the "casual Magic commuinty" will be just the same. Nonexistant.
At least I won't be missing anything.
See, I don't, and never did, care about CPA as a site, sites don't mean Jaques Merde. It's the community that matters, and the community is dead. It died and is trying to be reborn as something else wearing the mask of it's previous form.
Don't bother. You're wearing the façade right now, and it isn't working.
So, judging by the current course of events, soon I will move on. I'll still have my cards, I'll still go to prereleases, I'll still pick up some random old school cards for my T1/cas decks, and CPA will fade away in my memory. I'll remember a few names of the people who impressed me, and I'll remember a few names of the people who proved their immaturity, and on random occasion I'll (out of habit) come to the site when I'm thinking of boards I hadn't checked recently. And if contrary to my prediction, the site's active and lively, you'll receive my congratulations on a job well done. But it won't be my site...my community...any more. It will be the CPA, but in name only.
It'll be yet another general game site with the same general chatter about general game news procured from some other general game site's general news section...just one of a myriad of sites offering nothing special against any other.
Sure, we're not all as into Magic as we were, but we're still gamers and we still like hanging out here. Thank God we did protect the Coffee House, as it turns out, because the community we have here is more important than any single "game" we play, even one as great as Magic.