Disappearances of Leetspeak

I personally haven't been a part of many communities that would use leetspeak commonly until WoW where I saw plenty of people using it to communicate to the other faction, including my RL friend who brought me over to Firetree. Before that I primarily played Return to Castle Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory and I really liked that game, but my like aside, I don't remember a lot of uses of “leetspeak”. There definitely was normal internet slang such as “gg” or “lol” being used commonly but I never saw anything that would be considered part of leetspeak such as 1\/\/1[[\/\/[>{}[&[=4(3 which is of course my own version of leet speak which is completely unreadable and non-standardized if there is such a thing.

Since then and mainly in WoW the last swarm of leetspeak that I saw was with the release of the Honor System and mainly in Hillsbrad where many people of the opposing factions showed up, and pretty much liked either killing each other or yelling at each other in leetspeak or just random words that didn't make it past the translator. After that I haven't seen much leetspeak at all, but I haven't really been a part of many gaming communities since then either. I've been a part of a few different WoW communities and there was basically no leetspeak at all after Blizzard prevented it from displaying cross faction, I was somewhat a part of a Chomehounds community where there was more reminiscing about old mech sims more than anything else, and finally while I'm not active in the Star Wars The Old Republic community, I haven't seen any usage of leetspeak there at all.

So while I hardly saw any leetspeak I'm sure it was used quite a bit in the past, but with the rise of ventrilo I presume or maybe people just stopped using it after Blizzard limited it's usage after WoW, whatever the case, you'll hardly ever see elaborate things like 1 w1ll p\/\/n (_) n00b around.