the increase in numbers at the end werent because of retail df for sure. sod and hardcore brought back a lot of old players, aswell as preperations for cata. im one of those and according to a poll in our sod/hardcore discord atleast 53 of the 124 users in there werent subscirbed for months or years and resubscribed just because of sod and/or hardcore.
blizzard is unfortunately out of touch with the playerbase. the devs dont listen and the management is always producing bad news