Playing with Chinese?

[Mirage]

SE announced that they reached 2 million active characters a few years ago, for the first time in the game's history. A closed account with 5 characters would not count towards the amount of active characters (because they are inactive, not active), so this is not a completely irrelevant figure to work with.

Now of course, a character isn't a subscription, but how many characters do you really think the average player is paying for? I seriously doubt the average player has more than 5 characters. Of course, some have way more, in the form of crafting mules, AH mules, storage mules etc, but realistically, I doubt that's enough to push the average up to more than 5.

If we use 7.5 as a very rough estimate, (and most likely an exaggeration) for now, 2 million active characters means 266k subscribers. If we use an average of 5 characters per account (which I think is much more likely), we end up at 400k subscribers.

Who knows how much the population has decreased since 2009? I don't know. I would be surprised if it has decreased significantly, though. They added a lot of new stuff after 2009.

Source:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics...opics_all.html
Third entry from the top.

-edit-
For some more data, the 2009 census (picked this year because that's where the 2M active character count is from), 28.84% of characters were between level 41 and 75. Characters above lv 40 are unlikely to be mules, these are usually left at level 1-10.

This makes it probable that at the time the game reached 2 million active characters, ~29% or more of them were not crafting/AH/storage mules, which makes it plausible that the number of active accounts could have been around 500k at the time.

If you want to interpret the census statistics yourself, you'll find them here. I might not have interpreted everything perfectly, but I'm not trying to purposely skew the information that is available.

-edit again-
These statistics do not give us any information about how many players have multiple high level characters on one account. Dualboxing isn't unheard of, but this can't be done with characters on the same account, therefore the most common application of several high level characters on one account is when you would want to play on several servers. This is entirely guesswork, but I don't think this was a very common practice. Maybe it would be a fair assumption to estimate about 100k characters as being a high level alt on a different server.