The news is now a couple days old, but I just had an interesting epiphany reading…

"The night following the announcement of our plans to temporarily limit sales of the download version," said Yoshida. "A Realm Reborn recorded upwards of 218,000 concurrent connections. This is in spite of the fact that the peak login times for separate regions around the world arrive at differing intervals. We estimate that without time zone differences, the total number of concurrent connections would number anywhere from 300,000 to 350,000."

FFXIV had more concurrent connections than Star Wars Galaxies had PLAYERS
Here's the interesting bit. When SWG was a month old, it was the 2nd largest MMO on the planet¹

That's pretty amazing…

 
¹ Final Fantasy XI and Everquest were tied for 1st place with 450k.