WOW Review after almost 1 Year

[Darian]

That's 33.5k players on weekdays and 160% (800 / 500) (53.6k) on weekends. Note "worldwide" is specified above. Let's assume that there are 2 million subs worldwide (last I heard there were 4m), and let's assume that each day we get a totally different set of players (unrealistic), and let's be generous and round 33.5k up to 40k and 53.6k up to 80k. That's 40k * 5 (weekdays) + 80k * 2 (weekends) = 360k "raiders". Which is less than 20% of 2 million. And that was with me being generous (i.e. overstating the "raiding" population) every step of the way.
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Unfortunately, you were overly "generous" regarding the subscriber base as well. As with any subscription service of this type, you can rest assured that a large number of those subscriptions involve two types of people who can't possibly be part of the raiding pool you posit:

1) People who've been playing for many months, but only play a very few hours a week and still haven't even gotten a character to level 55 (thus not being the target audience for new content anyway as they're still exploring existing content), and

2) People who are relatively new subscribers, and still haven't even gotten a character to level 55 (many of whom are gearing their efforts specifically to be able to raid, thus being the precise target audience for new raid content once the expansion finally arrives).

These people make up significant numbers; for example, nearly 2/3 of Carpe Aurum fall into one of these two categories. If that proportion were to carry across the population as a whole, it means you'd be looking at 360k out of 667k, or around 50%.

"Hardcore raiders" may not be the lynchpin of the WoW community, but "players who have experienced most or all of the existing content" are always going to be more of a concern to any MMO preparing an expansion than "players who still have existing content to explore." If you're a very casual player who considers $14.99 or whatever a wise entertainment expense for 8 hours of playtime a month (and many people do feel this way), you're not likely to cancel your account because you're bored with all the content you haven't even seen yet. People who've been capped since January, on the other hand. . .