I see that Square has allowed us to see server populations again after it being disabled for over 1 year.
A collaborative effort by the denizens of 2ch has been made with them totaling up population numbers across all servers - this was the same feature they were using back during the first few months of the game to get the numbers:
http://blog.esuteru.com/archives/5551028.html
Title of the article, according to my Japanese-savvy friend is "FFXIV's population search count option has returned! The population has gone down a lot. lololol"
From what I can tell, this is an informal population survey - a bunch of people from 2ch - each person from each of the servers brings up the population count function at the same time of the day during a peak hour (not sure of the exact time, but it's a fixed time to maintain consistency). They report it to the thread and tally it up on a daily basis. Take it with a grain of salt.
FFXIV at one point had a peak population of over 47,000 players. I'm assuming this was in relation to some sort of patch or event that happened during that time? I don't know. The chart shows the population going up and down for a bit (but generally down) until the middle of November where it started making a downward spiral.
This game lost half its player base in one month.
A small update happened on that last week, then the feature was disabled. It's back now, and this is the current count across all servers for 12/17 JST. About 12,000 people; roughly 1/4th of the peak population's amount.
This is post patch (a time of a lot of interest) and pre-subscription (a time where we will lose a good chunk of players). This is also during the weekend where people have time to play, so you can consider this actually an ideal time in FFXIV's rocky history until 2.0. Keep that in mind.
My friend just showed it to me since I still play the game and he has no plans on coming back, so he's not sure if this will be updated on a daily basis and isn't going to bother sifting through 2ch threads for daily updates. I'm going to bother him a bit to try to find more info as time moves along - I want to see if the population post-patch will get higher, and how much of a drop we get once the subs hit.
What's pretty depressing about this is that with the sub model restored and if we were to keep this population, Square would only be getting $120,000 USD/month from subs alone. Even if they kept the original price of $15/month, that would be still only $180,000/month for them. I have no idea if that even pays for the upkeep costs of their servers plus the monthly salaries of their devs. Not my problem, as Square is a big boy and their devs are adults who are probably well aware of the current situation - so no soppy stories for them.
The issue here is if that price cut was enough to keep that 12k population number from getting any lower. We'll just have to see once subs start how many players we lose, and most importantly, how stable the population gets from now until subs start and from when subs start all the way until the 2.0 beta.
I do give Square kudos for bringing back the population count. They swallowed their egos on this one and they have to be given credit for that.