Lodestone Survey (unofficial Eorzean Census)

[Jadub2k]

Well obviously someone has no idea about the natural cycles in an MMO life where population ALWAYS goes up for expansion releases and drops afterwards again..
What you need to compare is "this late into 2.x" with "this late into 3.x". There is a slight drop, yes, but nothing major as you make it out to be.

While this is ture, whats also ture is that 3.4 will bring people back for that patch. Problem with that is the Really serious players will have smashed everything in the 1st 2 weeks, then everyone else in a month.. after that point, People mysteriously disappear suddenly until the next patch.. and its been like this for the last 5-7 patches.. when you can't create content that holds peoples attention for more then a month thats a problem and its not just NA, its effecting JP too.. and now that Legion is out, there's no way you can tell me that 507K are still playing this. It feels like FFXIV has become the "Back up MMO" instead of the 1st MMO you goto which kinda hurts my heart a bit but there it is and the dev team seems to be content with this..