How has your mindset changed with regards to other players since your started the ga?

[Driavna]

I'd like to emphasize your point with a little basic math.

WoW has an estimated playerbase of 113,085,582, with 7,520,191 of those being the estimated active playerbase. This comes out to 6.65% of the playerbase being active daily members.
FFXIV has an estimated playerbase of 23,549,199 with 2,237,174 of those being the estimated active playerbase. This comes out to 9.5% of the playerbase being active daily members.

The link that Forte posted showing visualized data for FFXIV has quite a lot of arbitrary caveats in who it considers to be an "active" member - and showing census data from two different sources that count activity in different ways will ALWAYS lead to discrepancies in how this data is produced. From what it seems, ScreenRant collects its data much like MMO-Population does - how many players have an actively log in per day, whereas the Reddit link collected its data and then chunked it down to players who meet very specific criteria - a lot of criteria which does not take in to account newer players, players who do not care to level and only RP/E RP, etc etc etc.

Additionally, both of the links are quite a bit outdated- with WoW's being before the release of Shadowlands and the Reddit one being pre-patch data. When it comes to statistics like this, anything over like a month is quickly going to become outdated data.

(Edit: I'd like to add that the numbers I'm using come straight from the "Game Data" section of each page, and that I did not analyze the graphs because I um... didn't want to. To be fair they'd only further bolster the point being made: WoW is kind of not doing so great. While it's the number 1 MMO for sheer numbers, it's not the best at keeping and retaining a steady percentage of players)

Poor retention is something applicable to any online game out there really. After the honeymoon period is over almost everyone is gone.

Anyway, I really don't get why WoW is used constantly as an escape goat. The "at least is not as bad as X" excuse makes no sense to me. (Not saying you are doing that MikieTea).