Ah, I see...in case you didn't notice...WoW lost 1/4 of it's playerbase....don't tell me that happened all the time cause it's exactly the first time that Blizz has to face such a decline.
Yes, it has always been a small up and down...the ups have usually been after an Addon...the downs started a year or so later. Now we had a very small up and the downs started already what? A month later? And all that after D3 had already seriously decimated the numbers of wow-players(so you'd expect a HUGE up with the addon...which just didn't happen). Nope, the situation is not compareable to anything that happened to WoW before....