Yeah, I remember a chart of player populations for various servers for the first two months of FFXIV being distributed amongst Japanese message boards. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it went from a shallow slope to a very steep cliff after September. IIRC those numbers were pulled from the Party search, which originally actually showed you the number of people on at a given time on a server. I found it funny and depressing seeing that number drop at a near-exponential rate after the first two months. Square, having a bit too much pride and worrying about the effect this would have on PR, removed the ability to see the current number of players on. That irked me as it was basically Square's way of admitting at that time that the game was dying.

But yeah, definitely would like to know where we can get these numbers now, and a population break down per server so I can assure myself that Saronia doesn't have as low of a population as I think it does.