You can think the numbers are synonymous across the board all you want, you'd be horribly wrong however.
Especially since you use different methods to arrive to those numbers for different games. For one it's the amount of players it had at peak compared to numbers now, and for one you want to compare all people who at some point in time though not at the same time played to the number of players they currently have. Just so you can arrive at a similar number in order to put a positive spin on the fact SWTOR lost 80% of the players compared to their peak. But if you'd extend your methodology on WoW to SWTOR, their numbers would only get worse, and that's ignoring the fact they've had far more people The only thing companies planning to release a major MMO need to understand from this is that you need to have a game that is attractive to players.
WoW did nothing but grow for years, SWTOR did nothing but shrink drastically to a fraction of the initial playerbase within half a year, hate to break it to you but there's NOTHING synonymous in those situations. This is like when people where trying to push the lie that the WoW playerbase shrank by over 50% in the first year to make SWTORs shrinkage seem natural, according to plan and even a sign of how great the game was doing because WoW had done it too.