Quote Originally Posted by Zarzak View Post
For more real numbers (already posted a couple posts ago)

70% of players quit after playing WoW for 20 months.
"70% of players quit after playing WoW for 20 months" is clearly not the same thing as "World of Warcraft loses almost 70% of its playerbase a month after an expansion", which were Nektulos-Tuor's words.

Also, while the data you have provided for that statement does look sound, there's no equivalent data to support your statement that "apparently EQ/Xi were good enough to keep a lot of the SAME people engaged for YEARS." Nor does it address the fact that the 30% of players that did not quit with 20 months (~1.7 million, based on a subscriber base of 5.6 million at the time the survey began) is a population several times larger than even EQ/XI's peak player bases.

It's possible that the number of players who have played WoW continuously for a period of years (however long you think that window should be for it to qualify) is at least as large as the peak population of EQ or XI, with the population of players that come and go, or play for a while but aren't retained, are simply a bonus on top of that for Blizzard.