Why isn't there a shortage of healers?

[KisaiTenshi]

For duties, wouldn't it be an easy way to just filter out what jobs have registered for duties and go by that result?
This would only work for combat classes obviously, but eliminate all "idle" factors and such, while providing a reliable figure of the jobs that people do duties on.

That would work if we were only looking at Duties and not Mainstream storyline, sidequests and all the crafting stuff. Like it's very hard to really go "let's see how many players are X role on Y date and Z time" and then say that's an accurate census. Take a look at the Lodestone at any one day and see which Role you are set as. Even the forum avatars tend to shift around slowly. So clearly SE has a way of eyeballing the current stats at any moment in time, but they need something to filter out otherwise the bots and RMT will skew towards BLM, and long-time hardcore subscribers will have 50'd everything even if they have no intent of playing all of them.

Like just counting level 50 jobs wouldn't work. Because that doesn't mean the player actually plays it. With the Combat jobs, simply counting how many Relic weapons there are would probably give a more accurate number and then further classify that by which one(s) are maxed out. I find it hard to believe that everyone would have a level 130/135 weapon for every single combat job. So given the ilevel requirements are 90, just counting mainhand gear over ilevel 90 would work. With DoH/DoL, that's a bit more complicated, and there are Lucis main hand gear.

So I guess what I'm saying is "figuring out" what a player mains could probably determined from statistical data (eg what they queue as), but I somehow doubt there are that many people who "main" crafting, and any you see in the wild are likely peoples alts/mules or bots. So SE could just as easily be looking at only one character per account.

[Spoekes]

That would work if we were only looking at Duties.

Yeah I said that in my first sentence.
Would at least be a figure quite representiative concerning df queues.

[Risvertasashi]

Like it's very hard to really go "let's see how many players are X role on Y date and Z time" and then say that's an accurate census.

Actually, it's very easy. It's probably the easiest option of all.

It's not sound, but it's easy.