In all fairness lfr isn't so bad as people make it here. You get the occasional dickhead, but it's not there every time at all, and a lot of those can be shut up by addressing them directly.
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Read the edit. I post it for you since you clearly missed it. If you keep blabbering, i find the list of how many players we had during when, because clearly you don't know that.
Anyway, the edit in my post that was there 30 seconds after the main post:
Edit:
On top of that wow lost a large chunk of the playerbase during Cataclysm that tried to turn more hardcore. Which blizzard have said many times over. How's that for your horrible idea of a proof?
It turned UPwards during wotlk, when they went casual. Gnrr! Seriously *stab*.
To translate for you. During the part you hated most we got more and more users. Towards the end it began falling, a bit as it always does during the end. Cataclysm came and it went a bit up very shortly, and then people began leaving. It very much contradicts your faulty(I can say this because you're WRONG :P ) idea of how things happened.
Edit:
Screw that. Now i got so annoyed with you that i found the graph. I was slightly wrong. It's even further from your idea than i remembered.