Is the community wrong?

[Rymm]

Their lifetime number of subscribers was catching up to WoW's number of active subscribers.

Does WoW even make the distinction between the two? I remember there being some grumbling when they made their big "11 million subs" announcement that they were counting all subs whether they were active or not.

Anyway, as to the OP's question- People like to complain. A lot. The playerbase here even more than average. If half the people who raised a fuss about something on the forums were to actually quit the game, it would be a ghost town. I take most of the complaints with a grain of salt and my personal viewpoint on most of the issues boils down to this attitude:

Can the game be improved by x, y, z?
Yes, certainly.
Would I like them to do x, y, z in the future?
Sure!
If x, y, or z doesn't happen, would the game suddenly become unplayable for me?
Nope, I can live without it.

There are a few things, of course, which I'm less cavalier about. Priorities depend on what is more important to each individual person. But I've yet to personally reach any game-breaking points in FF14, unlike WoW (why I quit there and am now here.)

[Nixxe]

Does WoW even make the distinction between the two? I remember there being some grumbling when they made their big "11 million subs" announcement that they were counting all subs whether they were active or not.

Yes, because the numbers were reported for the sake of investors, not players, up until they chose to discontinue reporting that metric in favor of ones they felt were more meaningful given how the game has changed. Per Blizzard's last self-report, over 100,000,000 World of Warcraft accounts have been created since the game originally launched. The active subscriber count peaked at 13 million in Wrath of the Lich King, fell to about 5.5 million as of the last official report, and is in all likelihood hovering around the 4-5 million mark now.

Granted, the number means something a little different than it does in FFXIV, as there are hard barriers between accounts in different regions. In FFXIV, you can play with the Japanese players or the European players from North America, though it may require selecting certain language options. In WoW, that number is divided between several service regions that are mutually exclusive with one another for the most part. There are some exceptions, such as OC and LA being grouped with NA, but NA can't play with EU can't play with CN.