Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
One thing unique to EW is it’s uniquely awful retention rate, all expansions see a drop off in their later patches, especially the lull between x.5 and x+1.0 but usually that dip is in the realm of 10-20%, according to the recent census data even though the WOW exodus affected the 6.0 launch 14 has lost close to 70% of its 6.0 playerbase numbers

That is not a healthy drop no matter how high they were coming down off
I'm confused. You're acknowledging that the WoW exodus anomaly grossly affected the data, then...immediately proceed to use that data? The % you cite is "unique" to EW precisely because the "WoW exodus" is unique to EW. It occurred at the tail end of ShB, but its impact first showed up in the 6.0 numbers. Most of those players were never going to stay. They weren't coming to FFXIV because they had taken the time to learn about it. They came here because they were "fleeing" WoW and FFXIV was another very popular MMO, so it became a "natural" destination of sorts. But FFXIV's popularity comes precisely from focusing on a different audience, a different type of gamer. While there will always be some overlap among different games within a genre, people who had never even touched FFXIV before and only played WoW were highly unlikely to be the target audience.

What you really need to do is remove that anomaly and either use pre-exodus numbers as the starting point, or use post-6.1 numbers once the population spike had already resolved itself. Do either of those and you'll see EW's retention rate is nothing other than the natural rate it (and every MMO) experiences. There's nothing special about EW's retention, and certainly nothing to scream the sky is falling over.