Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
By what measure, exactly? The deceptive marketing that tries to pretend as if 25 million accounts made equals 25 million active players? The game hasn't once hit the lofty heights of ten million active players that World of Warcraft enjoyed during its glory days and there's actually a decent amount of viable MMO's on the market that aren't lacking for player activity in the present day. Just because they may not necessarily be to your personal tastes or mine...that does not mean they do not serve as competition.

As an aside, the strawman argument of bragging about the activity of players was something that people did during WoW's steady decline as well. It didn't matter how many missteps that the development team made - there would always be a number of players insisting that everything was fine, that WoW was still on top even as more and more people quietly left.
The latest LuckyBancho census showed that there were 1.7 million active players, whereas WoW is currently estimated to have 1.1 million from here.

The source for WoW's playerbase depends on where you look, though, so it's difficult to find any good data on it. Here it says that WoW still has 5.5 million monthly players and 500k daily players.

I still firmly believe that FF14 is at or near its lifetime peak though, so whether we're #1 or not, we might not be for long.