SotW said:
You know some of these days it would be nice if we were formally informed that we are dead. The EN kc kancolle community has supposedly died or fallen out of god's light like what, 6-7 times already?
According to a friend who's been part of the community since the game's early days, most of the outrage over Intrepid actually came from Japanese players, and while her release did coincide with EN player fall off, it wasn't really the main cause.
As he claims it, the actual reasons were:
1. AL's growing popularity at the time, and EN players' growing general dissatisfaction with how Kancolle was being run. Intrepid was at most a final straw for players who were already considering dropping the game, she wasn't really a turning point on her own.
2. The KC wikia shutting down sometime after this, though this was entirely on Fandom being shit.
He also says that the community has actually seen some decent growth in recent years thanks to the English fan patch. Sounds to me like it's just the usual case of people who left the community, or were never in it, claiming it's dead because they don't have anything to do with it.