I haven't been the most active member of the community shenanigans and am not well known in here, but the closest ties do know that this has been in the air for quite a while.
I returned to disco in late January 2018 and started playing RP as a Coalition scientist. Finding a few like-minded people, we started SCEC that at the time looked promising. We had some fun for which I will be ever grateful to the guys from my faction and the factions we RP'ed with. With a course of time, however, I realised that exploration and science RP on disco is a quite boring and tedious thing. The world is static and visiting the same system multiple times for the sake of further research wasn't that fun. We got our officialdom after quite a while which also contributed to my loss of enthusiasm. Even with official status, the whole diplomacy/politics RP that I was interested in was very and very slow and stalled and I just got bored.
I heard the opinion that in order to have fun one has to be the spearhead of changes and organise activity ourselves. Due to some issues, it was quite hard to organise even our own team, mostly due to time zone difference. And after a while I just realised I don't know what to do once I log - everything seemed stale and even on seeing clusters of players in some distant system I had no desire to venture forth.
A funny thing, just a minor impetus to leave, was annihilation of Tempest as a fun ship to play after the carrier update. Nor only was it just meaningless, but also extremely boring to play even on PvE missions. My friends know that I was working long time on officialdom and RP to get the famous Tempest as I enjoy playing largest cap ships (and since my Japanese ping does not allow me to play anything smaller than a cruiser competitively).
Overall, my biggest concerns were boredom and extremely slow pace of the game, which are interrelated. Changes take ages to be implemented and for me primarily interested in diplomatic and science RP this was a serious put-off. We can't invent and implement things adequately fast, we can't make some diplomatic suprastructures adequately fast, etc. I do realise that both admins and players have their iRL stuff and are not rewarded for doing anything here and I do not blame them. That is not the cause, just symptom of what is going on here.
Besides, recently when writing up the faction lore I came across lots of illogical stuff in Coalition (and not only) lore that was difficult and not pleasant to work with. Not getting positive emotions from all that I reasonably questioned myself: why would I even do that? Thus, here I am, saying my farewells.
I would like to end on a positive note, saying that the server is still a positive and promising way to spend one's leisure time and I wish all the best to the community in both your iRL and ingame endeavours! May your gameplay be more satisfying than mine.
~Gardarik
P.S. some of the RP became way too cringy with 24 yo anime girls piloting battleships.
P.P.S. SCEC is not disbanded but will experience a change in leadership.