@Naoki Yoshida-> Make Samurai a Tank class!

[Shippuu]

"SEE THESE MINUSCULE SHIFTS IN NUMBERS, THAT MEANS YOU WERE, LIKE, SO WRONG!"

Well, golly gee, 2%, that's almost half the number of people who bothered to play endgame! You're right, cause there couldn't be any possibility that people decided DRK was something they could finally enjoy tanking with, but of course we're not going specify what are current and what are new players, that's obviously not a stat we'd want to know.

2% is hardly a number to scoff at, even if you lowball the current active subscribers to be around 200,000, that's still 4,000 new tanks. If you go closer to what the likely actual number is in 500,000 active subscribers, that's 10,000.

And the popularity doubling since last year... when it released in June... before QoL updates... and people getting a feel for the job... over a period of time when a main can get stale for a player often pushing them to try other roles/classes. Let's not worry about what makes the difference though, it said from previous year to current so that's what is important.

Unfortunately SE botched their graph for this year, and upon looking at it after sleep, the 47% being Dark Knight's is actually more likely meant to be 37%. So not quite doubled, but still significant.
The difference is a bit irrelevant however, especially when very few quality of life changes have been made to things like Dark Knight specifically. On top of the fact that it's widely accepted the best tank in the game is undoubtedly Warrior, yet it's not the most popular tank, means that Dark Knight, through gameplay/appeal/etc. worked as an addition to the tank pool. A "main getting stale" resulting in people trying/leveling tank jobs is still a positive gain, regardless if it's a delayed one, this means it has an actual long term beneficial effect.

The numbers still went up, which is the opposite of the trend from 2014-2015, where tank population dropped from 21% to 19%. It's now back up to 21%. It's a very common argument in these threads that "Adding new tanks won't increase the tank population." Which looking at this information can clearly be seen as untrue.

Oh, but someone might have said that there was no possible way people would try DRK? Not like it'd make sense that obviously some people are going to try AND like DRK and make a shift in occupation. But you got some fancy numbers to throw around, so who cares about those pesky finer details?

It's simply quantifiable evidence in response to people who plug their ears and ignore common sense. Of course people who haven't tanked would try AND like DRK, I've been saying it forever, it's the naysayers who come in and say "It's not increasing tank numbers, NOPE, only existing tank players play tank jobs." This is somewhat solid proof from SE that they're wrong.