227 people....

[Monty]

A server that doesnt merge means it is high because it doesnt require a merge, it has enough people, people merge into this server, making it even higher, and the leastest merge was less than a year ago.

Also there is only 1 prime time for the game itself, doesnt matter about regions, which is always PM>AM JST, it shows it on the wonderful census you showed.

Also dont know what your 2.6k is proving, If there was an average for 2.6k and you doubled it "just to make sure", that'd be roughly 5.2k active players on 16 servers that is 83.2k players, not 200-300k.

Also common-sense-Math is:
- Whats a good unrealistic number of active players: 10k
- How many servers are there? 16

AT MOST 160k, which is not nearly 200k.... cuse its 160k.....40 thousand away from 200k.

http://www.ffxiah.com/database

This gives you an idea of the player population on FFXI, to be fair though, a lot of those can be mules as it's any character to have accessed the auction house. Then you still have stragglers left on the old servers, one of my buddies has not logged on since the merger, but is still paying. So I'm wondering if those are characters that just have not registered on their new destination server.

Surprisingly enough that number has climbed quite a bit over the last year or so, prior to Abyssea coming out it was starting to hit the 220,000 mark (I actually follow these numbers quite a bit). Also, the numbers are quite accurate, the minute anyone cancels their content ID, it usually shows up in LS' and such as inactive through ffxiah. As I said though, many of these can be mules, how many exactly, I have NO idea. Peak time on merged servers can easily hit upwards of 5,000 players during JP prime time and about 3,000-4,000 over NA prime time.

On the subject of Abyssea destroying the game, my guess is they thought XIV was going to succeed so they figured, let's give XI a last hurrah. We'll add these great stats to everyone, raise the cap to 99, it'll be a blast. Then XIV didn't do as well as anticipated, and SE realized, shit, a lot of people aren't leaving XI...we've now created something really fun that doesn't transfer over to regular Vana'diel. So now they're stuck figuring out what to do with the game, trying to keep it fun while not boosting stats for every event. I enjoyed Abyssea a lot, but now, I need something else and VW is just meh. If they can just drop PS2 support and add new expansions, they could breathe a whole lot more life into that game that's sustained itself very well for 10 years now.