An Alternative? to parsers..

[Tridus]

It's actually pretty damn terrible when you consider they stood at 10+ million active players at the beginning of the expansion previous to that.

And far less than that by the end of said expansion. WoW's been on a cycle for years where people come back with a new expansion, play it for a while, and quit. WoD gained and subsequently lost five million subscribers in six months, which is when Blizzard stopped putting out official subscriber numbers. Nobody knows for sure just how low it got before Legion spiked it up again, but the pattern started in Cataclysm.

AFAIK, Warcraft Census also only includes EU and NA. The Chinese operation is entirely excluded, but it's included in the "10 million active players" number that Blizzard put out. So those numbers are not reliably comparable because they don't measure the same thing.

An actual apples to apples comparison is to compare the WarcraftRealms.net numbers with itself from the past.
Active characters right now: 1,705,559
Active characters on January 9, 2017: 1,939,909 (via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20170109...com/census.php )
Active characters on January 2, 2016: 2,111,349 (via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160102...com/census.php )
Active characters on January 3, 2015: 4,284,715
Active characters on January 9, 2014: 3,127,056
Active characters on January 21, 2013: 664,013 (no idea what's up with this number, because on Feb 10, 2013 it was 1,155,764)
Active characters on January 16, 2012: 3,352,153
active characters on January 8, 2011: 4,816,671
Active characters on Nov 25, 2010: 5,384,340 (compare to 4,668,736 on December 10, 2010 to see just how swingy these numbers are)
active characters on March 17, 2010: 5,956,356
Active characters on January 12, 2009: 8,096,731
Active characters on August 15, 2008: 6,619,804
Active characters on Sept 28, 2007: 312,095 (again, no idea what's up with this number, because on July 6, 2007 it's 6,560,407. Sometimes this data just doesnt make sense.)
Active characters on March 28, 2006: 4,538,166
Active characters on February 15, 2005: 1,263,640 (one of the earliest captures)

The Wayback machine has fewer captures once you get into 2008 and earlier. But you can see from this that it's never shown 10 million active characters, and usually shows nothing close to that even after Blizzard was saying they had 10 million active accounts. Anyone with alts that count as active would show up at least twice in these numbers, too.

Hell, if you compare to exactly a year ago, the census number has barely changed. With Legion being a year older this year and basically over, and no release date for the already announced next expansion, that number looks pretty solid.

Not that I would attribute damage meters to its decline. Those were in WoW pretty early on during its rise to fame in the first place.

Yep.