Has AO gone downhill?
Yes, and no.

When I joined it was a fairly active site...at the time the most active forum was cosmos, mostly discussing the latest topic involving recent war events...

then people started to leave...

slowly at first, regular people would start disappearing for weeks at a time...some months...some never came back...

why? because of gore...sorry gore but when you were modded this was AO's first mistake...there were at least a dozen people better qualified and less volatile than you at the time...if I remember correctly you at the time had several conflicts with members, primarily of the female persuasion, always talking about drugs, and making up stories about how you were going to die and such...

not exactly mod material...

I'm assuming that this set a few people off...as they were passed by for the position in favor of someone they saw as a bad choice...

then...

came the modding of Nihil...which I promoted and endorsed at the time...but then a lot of members became annoyed at what they saw was Nihil power-tripping...personally I don't think it was power-tripping as much as it was that Nihil forgot his friends...he changed...and everyone saw it...

those two things started the exodus of members...

then...the so-called necessary upgrade...was the straw that broke the camels back.

It isn't that the site has gone downhill...the problem is that there were 3 periods where we saw a mass exodus of regular members caused primarily by the 3 incidents stated above.

The very few remaining members that are still here and posting regularly may disagree...but I doubt the ones who left would.