No offence taken.

Firstly, I believe a breakdown of the players population by region or by actual play-time of the day will be a more appropriate gauge.

For a more objective view, Singapore is:

13 hours ahead of US & Canadian cities such as Washington DC, New York, Ottawa.
14 to 15 hours ahead of most other major US cities.
16 hours ahead of Los Angles.
7 hours ahead of major EU cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Berlin.
8 hours ahead of most major UK cities such as London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast.
1 hour behind Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

I am effectively bilingual, but the Japanese language is not one of the languages that I am proficient in. ^^;

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Secondly, the number of characters shown in FFXIAH database may be inflated as some players have multiple accounts and / or mules. E.g. I do have 2 accounts that I log-on concurrently at all times.

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No, I do not have an introverted fear of shouting for a LS. I'll admit I do have a fear of:

1) Getting stuck in a LS that I have to use {auto-translate} even for simple communications;

and / or

2) Telling the nice people in the LS: "Thanks for the assistance in the 3-4 battlefields required for the completion of SOA expansion! I had fun but I can't be sticking around as I will be concentrating more on <insert game name or real-life activities or commitments here> in the foreseeable future. Tell you what, I promise I will come back and catch you peeps again when SE releases the next FFXI expansion and I need help in clearing those new missions!"