Hi Tim, nice article - I'd like to point out a few things though that you haven't taken into account with your initial piece (apologies if this has been covered elsewhere in this thread)
The charts you are going from only take into account subscribers, and that includes for FTP games. Games such as RuneScape and Aion have much higher actual player numbers than those listed when you include free players - (RuneScape approx 2.5 mil, Aion 4.5 mil) so saying SWTOR is the 2nd most popular game in the MMO market is pretty disingenuous.
I'd also highlight that the numbers on MMO data are generally pulled from official reports - investor reports etc - which tend to be over-inflated, especially at the start of an MMO's lifecycle, using techniques such as including accounts that have lapsed for less than a fortnight, accounts which are still active in terms of paid subscription, but the player has stopped playing etc.
Obviously a lot of this is down to the inavailability of the data - MMOdata is a good way of tracking what companies are saying about their own numbers, but little else.
One thing I'd like to see an investigation of, is how many people can there be on a single server. I've heard numbers ranging from 15k to 30k players, with a concurrent limit of about 5k. (I think anyone that has played SWTOR will agree that even 2.5k players online at once is a massive stretch, this would be about 500 on the fleet, 100 on every planet and 500 playing operations.... higher than I've ever seen it by a long way). So even if we take the stretch limit of 30k... spread over SWTOR's 20 global servers would only hit 600k players. And that assumes that every server is full, including RP servers. Which we know isn't the case.
Yeah, it's difficult to know exactly how many people are playing SWTOR. I applaud you for trying. But look at the facts. Ignore the EA investor's reports, since they are simply there to keep investors happy until F2P happens and the numbers will jump anyway, hiding the subterfuge. No, the facts available to us show a very different story. And that story is around 200k active players.