Amen, though a little angel on my shoulder urges me to also point out that we ourselves, on numerous occasions, have ridiculed enemies who used the "RL came calling" argument as an excuse to explain their failure. I do think that Zombie tribal involvement and production in the war was less than stellar, for multiple reasons. For example: our layout was ill-suited to fight Punch, many of our initial frontline players turned out to be less than stellar (axisjack, lordgordo) , some turned inactive for different reasons, giving Punch a good headstart (floridaboi).
I could go on, but analysis of failure is inherently tied to leadership and the choices we made as well as the material we had to work with. Would things have gone differently if we'd stayed? Perhaps. But there's no denying that we lost quality with individual players leaving (westons, original sifo222), and that Punch did a better job of using inactive accounts as fodder, something we decided we would not stoop to. I guess it boils down to this: our diplomacy failed through no fault of our own. You and I did not deliver in the last two months. And a rimside tribe is at a disadvantage fighter bigger core accounts.