I agree with you, but that last paragraph is irrelevant. It's common for companies to flex their total number of players, if you want to follow this logic, it will make every older game seem worse than it is, and make newer games seem better. This fact doesn't represent much, maybe if you had 2 similar games, released at similar time, and both had exact same way of counting players, then you could use it for comparison. Other than that, it doesn't tell us much.
These facts from the source are definitely worth thinking about:
Yes, SE does sometimes listen to feedback, but most of it is very, very late. Living dead was fixed recently, Kaiten is still unsolved, with their reasoning that they'll add something instead being utterly irrelevant, since we still have nothing after 1.5 year. Do they think that those 25% are not worth their time?70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour. Source: Lee Resource Inc
95% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint instantly. Source: Lee Resource Inc
Reducing customer defections can boost profits by 25-85%. In 73% of cases, the organization made no attempt to persuade dissatisfied customers to stay; even though 35% said that a simple apology would have prevented them from moving to the competition. Source: NOP
80% of complaints received by an organisation are likely to have poor communication as their root cause, either with the customer or within the organisation itself.
Source: Unknown
Simple apology will be enough for 35% of the people, yet they resort to radio silence instead.
80% of complaints caused by poor communication? Well, it certainly seems that SE is above average in this sense. Do you remember when they said PLD deserves lower damage because he has range in magical phase, or when Yoshi told healers to just play ultimate if they want to have fun? Or when they gave 3 different reasons on why they removed Kaiten?