I was a moderator/staff member on Vis-Servo, so I'm familiar with almost every single detail as to why VS went down and why it also never finished its rebranding plan. Back in June 2013, Jade dissolved her short partnership with Tyrant (the original owner/creator) without any warning and essentially reverted ownership back to Tyrant. In doing so, Jade deleted all new programming (which she coded, so fair enough in my eyes), but she also deleted all new user accounts and associated data that was created during this brief partnership. Unfortunately, at this time, Tyrant wasn't keeping daily or even weekly backups, so her only backup was from April, which was terribly out of date at that point (even though it was only 2 months old). Not only that, but a lot of the features on VS were released uncompleted or released with severe bugs, which prompted many users to become frustrated with the game's lack of promising development. To remedy this, Tyrant thought a rebranding plan would be a good idea, but with a new child and a lack of funds (correct me if I'm wrong please), they both ultimately lead to the game's demise.
Trust me, Tyrant loved VS and put a ton of her time into it, so letting it go definitely wasn't easy. But with all that happened, the game as it was after the dissolved partnership was not functional enough to be played anymore. The re-development of the site was a good idea, but it required a lot of effort and many players (even though we had many dedicated players) had unfortunately lost interest in the game and were unlikely to support the game in the future. After all of this, I think it just became easier for Tyrant to let the game go and sell all of the game's assets in an attempt to gain some of the portion of her investment back from the game.
Their artwork was really beautiful. If Jade or Tyrant ever read this, you still have a fan 
