It happen's each expansion cycle, at end of ARR, HW, SB, and now EW the forums, youtube, and discussion subreddit were filled with doomers trying to one up each other about how dead the game was and how bleak the future was. Then the next expansion comes out and we get more people than previous expansions launch. It's common across all MMOs, population yo-yos with content cycles, with biggest drop being leadup to the next expansion. The main indicator being if during each expansion's life cycle, if compared to the same point of previous expansions, if the population, and engagement are higher or lower. So far EW has shown to be retaining most of it's growth compared to previous expansions, with only expansion beating it being Shadowbringers, due to the WoW exodus, but that shouldn't be considered the norm for any expansion, since we can't always count on our biggest competition doing so poorly it drives over a significant amount of it's players to us.