Look, your optimisms is refreshing but at the end of the day I live in reality. CCP is failing and their jobs are on the line...literally. They just sold Valkyrie to Riot Games for no reason. If they had half a brain they would be able to develop it and make more money the first year it was out then what they sold it for. They Cancelled WoD for no reason. They could have crowd sourced from 10's of thousands of people that would have happily donated 10 bucks to see it get done.

CCP will need you to spend money on micro transactions in order for them to keep a free to play game, Legion, a competitive game in the industry. Giving you free stuff will undermine any ability early on for them to do this. I assure you, they are going to start everyone off from scratch on a new system. They are in rapid desperation for money and it is 100% obvious that this is the case.

I want you to ask yourself right now. How many people will play Legion tomorrow if it was released tomorrow? The answer is, a percentage of Dust players and whoever they are able to tap into through the median they distribute the game. If it gets released on Steam then their player base will be quite high right? If they release it like they do Eve, the player base will be "some percentage of current Dust players and Eve Players". That small number of players must keep the game afloat and the only way to do that is micro transactions and/or monthly billing of $X OR some combination.

You have to understand they want to make money. Transferring people's stuff over is not going to increase or decrease the number of players that come from Dust and make those same players commit to micro transactions. They will likely start people off with some things like in game currency or in game items but in no way are you going to have a significant head start over a brand new Legion Player that never played dust. They NEED people to make micro transactions

All of that being said, I have a very strong feeling that CCP will be bankrupt before Legion is even out. The stakeholders who invest and run CCP don't have the ability to run the company correctly and do not care about you. They don't care about me or what the Dust community want. The devs care because if we aren't happy then we don't play the game and don't spend money AND finally, they don't have a job. Of course they want us to be happy. I bet you a reasonable number of them work massive overtime and are highly underpaid in order to keep us playing Dust and to help make whatever the hell else CCP Leadership wants.

Anyway, that's all. Believe what you want, IDC. At the end of the day I'm sick of doing pick up squads with some idiot saying that "CCP said they will transfer our stuff".

Sigh, do you think that site actually shows the active players in Dust? Really? To be clear, there are three population values we can look at:

Total players
Active players
Online players

Total players is the total number of people who ever played Dust. Active players are the players who played a few matches over the past couple days or so. Online players are the number of players currently online at a specific moment in time. The site you mentioned only tracks currently online players. You seem to be confusing online players for active players, which is incorrect obviously.

When it comes to discussing how large your player base is, you use the number of active players as those are the people who still regularly play the game.