Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
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.
1) if I use 6.1 data then between 6.1 and 6.5 the game has lost 45% of its playerbase, still not remotely a good number

2) I still have no idea why people just automatically assume the WOW players were a lost cause, 14 did absolutely nothing to even try to retain them (sure sure different game different crowd……) but if your competitor dumps 1 million players into your lap you try to hold onto them, not just do the same thing you’ve always done then go “nothing we could have done so sad”