People get bored playing same game over and over. Game has been more then 10 yrs old. Can you eat same food for 1 month? I don't think so. So people always take some break and during summer activity has always been low since people go out in beautiful weather. During winter activity increases and i have seen same trend over last 5 years. People always come back sooner or later.

Merging never works. It never works between different clans or at least that what I have seen from other clans.

More or less ET players post less and play more. It's same in gaming world or most of the FPS games.

Also their are many new games coming out and some are interesting or fun to play. Loved flying jets, shooting tanks, etc in BC2. Same for COD series. Sometimes people just get bored playing old game and then tend to move on.

The only thing you/we can do is increase the awareness of ET by posting on other general gaming forums. Once you play BF3 and other latest COD series games, gamers say wtf kind of graphics is this? It's so old and they move on.