I think the problem with the 50 player patch wasn't so much with TWI's end of it (although it's debatable about the whole SMG/Semi/boltie ratio issue), but rather that too many servers just threw up any old maps without bothering to really tailor gameplay to suit 50 player servers. Or to the extent they did, they tailored it to suit someone else's idea of how a 50 player map ought to play.
Me, I think the maps like Berezina, Leningrad, Zhitomer, etc. were great on 50 player servers. Krasnyi Oktyabr, Danzig, and to a lesser extent, Stalingrad Kessel, were not so great because they were never designed for 50 players and became too cramped. Some people enjoy that style of gaming. I'm not one of them.
I tend to think that RO doesn't really do that version of gaming all that well, or at least not as well as other more out-and-out run'n'gun games like COD, DOD, BF2, etc. Certainly I think RO isn't playing to it's strengths in situations like that, and isn't acheiving its full potential. The game can do a LOT more than just be yet another run'n'gun only -- wow! -- without crosshairs. Yeah, it can do that style of gameplay, but it can't do it as well as, say, a BF1942. Likewise, BF1942 can sort of be tweaked to be more "realistic" (IE: Forgotten Hope), but it can only go so far. RO goes WAY further, but much of that effort is lost when you have 50 players on a tightly-packed infantry map with lots of SMGs. That said, even if it hadn't been SMGs, it would've been something else -- nade spam, hip shooting, etc. Put simply, there's no way the smaller maps can be made to work with 50 players, although they can be MORE tolerable than they are with fewer rapid-fire weapons.
Anyway, some of this is due to changes in the game, some of it is due to competition from other games, and some of it is due to people just flat-out burning out even if they don't mind the game changes and can't find anything else they'd rather play. Some days I look at the games on my computer and just can't bear to play ANY of 'em because I'm just TIRED of 'em. That's usually when I fire up DOSBOX and play something I haven't played since I was 12.
My point is that some of this is just the lifecycle of any onling FPS (or any game, really). An end comes eventually. You can stave it off with mods, new content, etc., but the end DOES come eventually. My only sadness here is that I think RO COULD have squeezed more life out of itself but was in some ways doomed to its ultimate fate by circumstances beyond TWI's control.
