In the early days of my server, all these big alliances with 100 people got crushed... by alliances with less than 40 members.
Luckily for Jaq, they gained lots of people as Jaq was a likeable person (his posts on world chat result in hundreds of replies), and survived even when the majority of players on the server despised them. They never were the few, and I remember them being in every state since Day 2.
They were so prominent that my first kill was an ex-Jaq. They still are prominent.