Square Enix, it's time to come clean about your plans for the future

[Jojoya]

and an even tinier group of forum posters are pouting because that tiny group of forum posters represent the majority of players.

Proof is in the pudding. Get them to quit.

You mean the success that happened after the WoW exodus (and all of those players or at least a big majority of them left because... they got bored due to the lack of content which made the game basically go back to pre wow-exodus numbers ) ?

How many of them have permanently left instead of doing what YoshiP encourages players to do - play other games while waiting for more content to be released?

Have always been somewhat curious regarding how many new players started playing at/around the same time as the WoW exodus but actually had nothing to do with said exodus.

I started playing around that time and certainly fell victim to the high login queue times, particularly since I was on a free trial account at the time (in fact, I found I couldn't log in more often than not) but was completely unaware of the WoW exodus - at least until a friend made me aware of what had occurred.

Difficult to say. Lucky Bancho has their unofficial census but it's limited to character over level 60. Not everyone is going to be leveling at the same pace. You're also going to end up with a lot of low level alt characters mixed in with the character belonging to new players.