I agree with Valast wholeheartedly that the community needs to do more to bring more players in, and that the players need to try and bring more players in.
For me its like a shop. There are 2 reasons I would go into a shop. If I needed what it had, or if it had good advertising. Now for me, I barely even look at radio/tv/physical ads anymore, and only pay attention if they bring up something I had previously wanted. However, I am definitely likely to go into a shop, or try a restaurant/food joint if it was recommended to me, and I had even the slightest interest in the stores products. Word of mouth is an extremely powerful advertising tool.
The thing is, not a lot of people go looking for a roleplay heavy, medieval war simulator that is mostly text based. You would have to have quite a bit of previous interest in the subject, or see a review on it from a reviewer you liked to actually try it out. Currently we have Battlemaster on Facebook, but its extremely passive. Facebook is massive, but you still can't expect to just post things and have the masses arrive on your door step. Now if every player recommended the game to 10 people, even if they knew those people might not play, and you got a 1-10% conversion rate on those players, thats between 100-1500 new players. The games not big enough right now to pull, sustain and grow a player base by itself.
