Pretty much what Aka Split said. FF14 had a good population size but it's population really took off when WoW went through two of the worst expansions in the history of the game. The result was the "WoW Exodus", where a massive amount of the playerbase and content creators left WoW for FF14. The initial player exodus wasn't that bad as people naturally move on to other games when their game is in a shit place but when the streamers and youtubers started to try out FF14 and the general consesus was that WoW was dogshit, it REALLY fucked WoW's population. It turned that player exodus from a steady stream of players into a flood of players, eventually resulting in FF14's servers going to shit for a while because they were woefully unprepared for the amount of people hoping in to FF14.
If you're Blizzard and you see established WoW content creators making shit like this, you know you've fucked up on a colossal level.
