I was thinking about the recent developements in FO. I think the more the game is changing, the less popular it seems to get.
I (just my view of things, no flames necessary, state your opinions) see a few reasons for this:
Firsty, I'll give the example of Junktown as a town which is abandoned now. Before the wipe, you could kill in certain areas of the town - it was a bug, yet this bug made people run around killing each other, but they had to avoid the guards view. Town was thriving. There was a bug (another one fixed now) which allowed you to enter the town at night - now impossible, thus preventing the town from being inhabited. Strangely, bugs made the town very active!! Contrary to now. This made some people pissed off, yet they kept on gaming there and fighting and coming back! Now, Junktown is empty and boring.
The red nicknames of players who you could kill in guarded cities - was a fine idea.
Secondly, crafting now is a huge pain, no one want's to spend his whole time of play making alloys or metal parts, for a gun that he will eventually lose anyway in less than 2 minutes of play time. The old crafting tables were much faster and user friendly. Actually the would-be interaction from gathering timeouts has been a huge miss. And the new crafting timeouts, for me = instant kill of a great game. The player can't have more than 3 professions - another miss which is very annoying.
Thirdly, the harder leveling (which I was a huge fan of unfortunately) made the game slower and more boring again. You have to level for a long time to finally get to PvP play. People who don't game 24/7 have no chance to keep up with those who can spend more time, just dully leveling on some poor critters.
Also it became almost impossible to find anyone in the open wasteland fighting something too, while it was frequent before wipe.
I wonder how do you see all this now. I just don't see myself playing that much if I have to spend 30 minutes crafting ammo for a quick attack :p