I see it a bit differently... they left after being utterly crushed both militarily and politically; they never won against LaF 1v1 which was their ultimate goal. They claimed they would run LaF from the game and LaF would never net again. The word "ninja vanish" was used, which IMO is a synonym for "we're already beaten". LaF won the double crown 2 rounds later as Rival pissed away the last of the good will they had with ppl like TIE, ICN and a few other tags by suiciding on LaF from those tags. :)

Those who are back now are NOT the Rival'ers who ran the show back in the day and made all those poor choices -- if they were I'd probably have had to rejoin LaF to re-fight those wars again instead of having a great time with PDM. The Rival'ers I talk to today are a pretty nice group.

As a bonus bit for AT: Rival/TIS sort of tipped their hand and confirmed that TIS had signed off on Rival killing us perpetually, so we in LaF started planning an exit strategy from SLIT around then too...