Thread: 18.5% drop in players in only 8 weeks

Originally Posted by TheOperator3712

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.

The last tier of the expansion always sees the biggest drop in XIV. The only reason ShB blew up the way it did before EW was because the WoW crowd was pissed off and XIV has a really generous trial.

This is completely normal.