Ye, people left because someone was racist. Are you mentally stable? People left because Marcus started banning warteam leaders for whatever reason, on a whim, because he felt like it. Just because he wanted to enforce his stupid rule of "no trading accounts on lowrate servers" he was going around incognito on warteam teamspeaks, suggested to sell a character, then once he knew the IGN of the interested player that person got banned. And it happened. Multiple times. Marcus is the true assassin of his own servers, not the players, it's time to realize that he is not a serious and professional hoster.
Spoofs are also Marcus's specialty, as
@Adposatnr mentioned - i remember that once Mastercores managed to bring in a few warteams yet again, there were SUPPOSEDLY 350 people online on Azera, while more than half of it was level 20-40 eks with red backpack on them, rope shovel and 8 fishes inside that were manasitting in the weirdest spots you could think of. There were also "maker spoofs" that had around 12 bp of any rune made after 1 hour of being online. It wasn't unheard of that level 17 sorcerer with magic level 10 had 12 bps of sd on him. All of those characters were always fully blessed.
I don't think its coincidental at all.
Marcus is just a very good liar and I wouldn't be surprised if the whole situation with "racist Lauri" was just for PR.
I am also certain that he will deny everything that i talked about, because he does it everytime. I played on ClassicOT, the european DarkOT 2 years ago, there was apparently 1200 players online, yet I could only find around 400 characters on the map provided within the onlinelist, and I don't believe that getting level 50 is such a milestone on x50 exp server. Also, every good spawn was empty. Really tells you much.