Based on what I am seeing in-game, there may be some residual impact of DDOS attacks, but the major thing is that we are seeing many more players returning than perhaps they expected. So over the course of the game since ARR we may have had as many as six million player accounts, at least 80% of which were legitimate players. But active player stats scraped from the Lodestone showed much lower numbers for players actively subscribed over the life of HW. With the returning players campaigns and the launch of StormBlood with Red mage *and* Samurai, the game appears to be attracting a fairly significant number of returning players , and new players.

I suspect that we are experiencing what is known as a very healthy player population that exceeds expectations.