Why?
The problem is two-fold. The whole crux of this entire thing has to do with 1) Attracting new players and 2) Retaining new players.
As far as I'm aware we advertise shit-all (which is to say, we advertise very little/at all). Advertising is our net, right? We use it to catch fish. Well, we should be, at least. Whatever revenue is being gained from Toribash, a portion of it should go back towards promoting the product (common-sense business practice). Failing that, generate revenue by selling ad-space for non TP/VIP users and funnel that revenue back into advertising Toribash. Failing that, stick out your hands and have a community donation drive, "We're too stingy to invest in advertising ourselves, but please feel free for you to do it instead". Just do something, for Pete's sake.
The 2nd part of the problem is retaining the new players. We've already got solutions for this. Check the thread Powas made about bringing Toribash back to life in S&I. Have beginner-oriented events, have Tori-Agents sitting in beginner servers dispensing advice and wisdom. We already know how to engage newer players in Toribash, we've done it before. We just need to start doing it again.
Seems ironic coming from a person who lied about there gender, got in a relationship with a player, then laughed and mocked them when they were going through a tough time in there life.
iirc, toriagents aren't around just because they became part of the GM usergroup. toriagents are a must imo, not sure why there hasn't been any talk about their return. i'll fix that soon
yee ha brother 2017
Good luck keeping people from getting burned out. Being a tori agent gets pretty boring pretty fast, atleast that was the general feeling when TAs were around. I remember sometimes joining in on them back when I was a GM and after 15 minutes I wanted to take a gun to my head. Beginner tournaments are also a nightmare to host since you get alts and have to verify manually every account. tl;dr Tori agents would be like trying to apply a band aid to a 6 inch wide wound.
What needs to be worked on is smoothening out the learning curve and making more efforts to bring people on the forums or make it so that the game isn't so heavily forum oriented. Also the game needs new ACTUAL content (not cosmetics). I've been playing since 2009 and the way the game is played hasn't changed. 2v2 would be a nice addition (and dont give me that crap that the average computer aisn't powerful enough, that has been the excuse for the past 8 years for christ sake).
Machine muscle was an argument people tended to use years ago when more than 1v1 was a thing & ran like crap on older hardware, and yeah, it was a legitimate reason for it to not happen at the time.
However the real reason it vanished was far simpler - It was shit.