I'd posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.
Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.
But there are other websites which put World of Warcraft in the lead. It’s also worth mentioning that World of Warcraft has much higher twitch statistics than FFXIV.
Hm last I checked it said WoW had a lot more, I think mostly due to the new expansion at the time. But I think different sources are stating different things, they're pretty unclear where they get the numbers from anyway, there's little consistency with other statistics online.
It’s hard to get exact numbers from WoW because they’re not publicly available. You might be right that WoW is still the biggest, I found some other numbers that disagree. WoW’s twitch numbers seem to be way higher.
Yeah I was looking at Twitch numbers too, but honestly it'd still be a wild guess why it's that much higher. Could also be that they do something with Twitch drops, it essentially doesn't say much about player count itself.
I know previously it was because of world-first races, but I'm not sure if that's still the case.