Been seeing a lot of doomsaying in forums/in-game lately

[Jeeqbit]

Do we have exact figures on the population? I’ve heard that EW had the biggest drop off in history after the main surge came.

There is always a big drop-off after people finish with the expansion. It stands to reason that a bigger surge will be followed by a bigger drop-off. It didn't help that free trials and sales were stopped.

The figures he puts out just show a maximum of unique characters based on activity subject to the criteria it sets out during the timeframe it's undertaken, so whilst useful in that regard, they don't really give an accurate reflection of where subs sit at any given moment.

Official figures would probably not give an accurate reflection either because most companies release these to their shareholders every 3 months on a 3 month basis and the figures are referring to a quarter that happened some time ago.

I would probably argue the opposite some.
So when FFXIV claims to have 35 million active accounts, yet it only maintains an active player base of 1.7 million currently. That shows a couple various things.

1. There are possibly a lot of bot accounts for this game.
2. There is something that is causing a lack of retention for players.
3. There is something that is detracting players while attracting new players.

What you should remember is that, assuming we had 1.7 million subscribers every month, that 1.7 million may not be the same people each month. That pool of 35 million accounts could take it in turns to be that 1.7 million. A lot of people do in fact subscribe to do the story content and then play something else for months or years. Every time you see the returner flower is evidence of that.

A lot of them are obviously bots but it should be possible to go through the history of ban reports and calculate how much we need to subtract.

No online game is going to have 100% retention. Sometimes people try a game and it's just not for them or they stop having time to play.