Because he's looking for weak excuses to bump old threads.
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Yes, it's registered players, ie people who have bought the game, played for a while then quit. Retention in MMOs is very hard.
SE have never given out their concurrent player values just words like it's increased with X expansion or it's bigger than ever.
The latest figure from Google is 18 million last December. But... how many are still playing. A million maybe at most. Still very good!
For me, the way it counts the active pop is kinda weird. It is not about how many characters logged on in last month, but how many characters have claimed the "Dress-up Raubahn" mount from the 4.1 story. And this means nothing, since those who didn't even bought Shadowbringers and not logged even once since then is being counted as "active" and it let those leaf people out of the actives count.
All that matters to me is there are people to play with and I am able to run content. There are plenty in all areas on my server. Also, there's obviously enough players to keep things going and make the game successful.
The last few posts is EXACTLY why that person necro'd this thread. Half the people won't even realize it's been necro'd and will think it's current, and so will post accordingly. It's negative info. The WoW forum moderators used to have a rule that thread necroing was bannable for this very reason.
OP was made before Shadowbringers launched, and around the end of Stormblood. Of course the population would be low around that time. It's like that in any other MMO. That's called an expansion cycle.