Player numbers?

[angienessyo]

It's difficult to tell through Steam because so much of the playerbase isn't on Steam. I'm personally curious how much the new Eureka/Bozja will mitigate people leaving/taking a break. As the lack of one had a lot of my friends nope out until Dawntrail.

[Wolferey]

they only show off how many accounts there are out there every few years.... which is a kinda pointless number

they do say its registered accounts, but every census/lodestone scraping has shown that its just how many characters there are on the lodestone.. which means if you ever created an alt character, you count as "a new account"

[Jeeqbit]

Lucky Bancho is what people usually use. The figure remained stable throughout Endwalker, despite what everyone said about it.

SE also said that Dawntrail had the most pre-orders ever for an expansion. Which says a lot.

As of 12th June, Lucky Bancho reported 1.22 million active characters.

[Thurmnmurmn]

Except that didn't work most of Endwalker, where players kept going "Look at the Steam numbers, the game is dying!" just for statements from SE to come out showing that FFXIV was the one area of solid growth for them.

That wasn't what happened. People were cherry picking a small period of time post patch as proof of the game dying. Others actually also used steam numbers to show an overall growth over time to counter "the game is dying" threads.
Steam numbers can be used to see trends but yeah, serve nothing when it comes to knowing the overall count.

I agree with your last point. As long as there's enough people to play with, who cares how many more there are.

[sharknado]

Just leveled my WAR through 91-9X dungeons and most of the groups were heavy on mentors. Few had first-timers but still, it looks like within Dawntrail we have mostly seasoned players, this isn't Sproutbringer anymore. Plotwatchers as always are quickly gone after release but it's curious if the MSQ quality has influenced when they cut their sub. On the other hand mid-EW or alike there were apartments in Gridania plots and now those are gone, only some in Ishgard remained. The game gained seasoned players post Sproutbringer but that doesn't mean people aren't taking breaks and that now the breaks may be longer or on a higher % of the player base.

[Jeeqbit]

Just leveled my WAR through 91-9X dungeons and most of the groups were heavy on mentors.

Duty Support.