Steam, LB and Quarterly Estimate Chart

[NegativeS]

Not to be the guy putting hot sauce in the curried goat, but...

• Steam (peak players logged in per month)
• Lucky Bancho (active non-trial characters over 2-4 month intervals)
• SE (recurring monthly income divided by the sub fee)
• Achievements Enabled (invested players with big sunk cost and their behaviour, by Lucky Bancho)

...after having conversations like this numerous times on the WoW forum over their census data and whether or not the game was dying, I can't take stuff like this seriously.

Steam might be the most accurate to people actually playing since unlike a lot of games on it you don't need separate Steam accounts to access multiple XIV characters/accounts, but of course that's only an unknowable portion of the playerbase.
Without an ability to read Japanese or get an accurate translation of the page, it's impossible for me to know what 'active' means in this context--on for the majority of time, or logged on a single time? Additionally, does not account for players with multiple characters, players with multiple accounts, etc--a common pitfall of attempting to gauge WoW's popularity purely off of census data.
And the 'Achievements Enabled' link, I can't read, so I have no opinion on it. Too low quality, and in a language I can't understand (that is too low quality to translate).

That just leaves the SE stat, which... seems to vary uncomfortably wildly. I'd love to know the exact numbers you used for calculating this.