Speaking from what I remember, it seems that a lot of factions suffered from a
"this is new and exciting" brain drain when it came to later additions, even the staff team (to an extent) was affected by this.
Whenever great change emerged (such as the re-introduction of the Warsaw Pact side, Stasi's D9, later even the NATO battalion) and a new faction/other thing was introduced, often the few active players would clamor aboard and neglect their older (faction or otherwise) obligations or even decline into inactivity over time as the craze wore off.
As an example, NJSOC started with about six people from memory, me
@afric @Danny @Angel @kifer and someone else who's name I can't remember off the top of my head. That sixth person didn't even show up a week into launch and ended up removed, as was Angel a few months in, followed by Kifer when his coursework piled on and couldn't spare the time.
That left me,
@afric and our own lead against the entire soviet arsenal, the stasi and the ineptitude of some of the fellow insurgents.
We ended up getting wiped out thanks to the king of compass designations,
@Numbers, which paved the way for NATO to be reintroduced as their own core component in the dying days of the server.
I think our success laid in the simple strategy of simply never telling anyone outside of the unit who we were or what we were doing. We were 'tourists', or 'mechanics' or 'that tow truck driver', unlike the remnants we didn't shout our identities from the rooftops and always used codenames and cover identities.
The only one we trusted became
@Numbers and that was after him sniping half the battalion and other acts you really wouldn't think a stasi agent would do to his own side, then again you didn't have a good grip on him yourself and that pretty much screwed everyone playing the espionage game up in the end. I mean,
he was the guy behind the plot to kill Fischer to begin with. All I did was build the bomb.