Quote Originally Posted by Reap00 View Post
It does keep growing. This is the normal ebb and flow you see every expansion. You will see these numbers drastically skyrocket after the expansion announcement. Enjoy all the hype that is coming! I know you are excited for it!
There is no "normal ebb and flow". You can see this if you go back and look at what past surveys said. ShB had a massive influx of players at this point of its expansion, and SB had massive DDoS attacks that were expected to be decreasing the player count. I tried to find similar data for 3.45, but there was not a survey conducted by LuckyBancho for 3.45. To your point about expansion announcement driving an increase in player count, 5.45 included the announcement of EW muddying the data, and the trend from 4.4 to 4.5 saw an increase after the end of the DDoS attacks(4.45) followed by a small drop with the release of 4.5.

Case in point, there is no such thing as a normal pattern, because we don't live in a vacuum with normative conditions. Events outside the game are important driving factors to the game's population that prevent accurate comparison to supposedly similar points across time.

PS From a data analysis perspective, the hype train for ShB did not begin until after patch 4.55.