Quote Originally Posted by Jeeqbit View Post
I disagree, because we as players can gather a huge amount of statistics. We can analyze the lodestone like Lucky Bancho or the census website does, we can look at the Steam data, do polls, gather statistics on number of PFs at certain times, number of people in certain zones, number of sprouts at certain times, how often NN is at max capacity, the world status page shows us whether SE considers it congested. We have a lot of "fan websites" that have statistics they either do publish or could publish, as well as many large discord servers that have Server Insights available to them that will show them a lot of the same data SE can see about endgame player habits (spoiler: there is a spike when there is a patch).

But statistics are only as good as how you interpret them and two people can often use the same statistic to paint a completely different picture depending on their perspective of how the statistic came to be. That goes for developers too. SE could see the statistics looking good on the surface and it's possible they don't delve deep enough into them to see a problem somewhere.

The one thing we do know is that the Lucky Bancho statistics are pretty good right now and have been throughout Endwalker. Better than in prior expansions beside the WoW exodus moment in the months before Endwalker. If there is something deeper in the statistics that is a problem, it's ultimately not yet manifested in an overall decline of players back to, say, Heavensward levels, by those stats and it's not even declined below 1 million by those stats yet.

too.
Or you can just look at quarterly financials which are public info, but those aren’t popular here since they are higher than past expansions.