Quote Originally Posted by Yinnyth View Post
Many people think abyssea was the greatest thing to ever happen to the game. It put everyone on the fast track to the top. People believe that this increased the popularity of the game.
That's precisely what I meant. No evidence to support that statement, just dubious and unsupported quantifications like "many think" or "most prefer" and things like that. And I don't blame people for that, because that's all that can be said, because we simply don't have accurate data for that argument. We can't even say for certain how many players we lost or gained, because we don't have data on that either. All we do have is second-hand data like the FFXIAH player database, and the passive indicators about servers being merged along with averaged online numbers gained by "/sea all", all of which point towards a significant player loss slightly before, during and after the Abyssea era. Everything else is guesswork or confirmation bias.