if even 90% of the players were using the EC that wouldn't be any reason to remove the CC...
Exactly true. Which is what the developers just said in the interview before Christmas. (Plus - they purposefully pointed this out to drive the point home.)
It would be nice if they gave an update to that with more specifics, like how many months the average CC new player stays before leaving compared to the average EC new player so we could see which client has the higher satisfaction rate from new players or things like that.
It would also be interesting to see what the breakdown in client choice was for new players. How many actually choose CC, how many actually choose EC. Of course, then you also have to ask, if you use it for a week, then switch and play with the other for a year, which did you actually choose, how long of a time frame are you looking at to determine use, did either really retain the player if the sub was over after a year, etc. Lots and lots of metrics.
For client user-ship, I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn't a simple threshold. I would suspect there is a percentage of the players that only use the EC, a percentage that only use the CC, a percentage that use one most of the time, but dabble in the other and vice versa, along with some that split time fairly evenly. This might be part of the reason that even when the developers give numbers, they hedge and say "about".
Let's say they gave a client user-ship update once every year. What good would it do? If it moved back to 60/40 CC/EC, a portion of the players would scream bloody murder to get rid of the EC. If it continued the trend and moved to 40/60 CC/EC, a portion of the players would scream bloody murder to get rid of the CC. Plus, some of the players would ignore the number - whatever it was - and just keep making up what they wanted to hear, then repeating the made up number ad-nauseam.
I would love to see updates on client user-ship and overall player base, etc. The technical stuff is interesting to me. I loved the last newsletter with the definition of perspective and the explanation of the artwork and the reasoning behind the choices made. It seems like a few of us do really enjoy that peek behind the scenes.
However, that type of (subscriber) info is probably corporate confidential (legal, market competition, etc.). Also, potentially incendiary to an already.....passionate?.....player base.