Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
Wait, back up - because not everyone finished the 3.3 story the game is automatically 'dead'? You do realize not everyone has the expansion installed? Not to mention there has been a significant amount of new players entering the game who are nowhere even near the start of 3.0 let alone 3.3. Enough with the doomsaying already - it wore thin back when people were saying the game "was dead" even during launch when servers were overloaded with too many players trying to login, and now it just seems a worn out and tired argument.

Hells, where did this 'unofficial' census get it's information from? Not server info that's for sure save of taking info from the Lodestone which is usually inaccurate anyway due to how slowly it updates. A little reality is needed here.

EDIT: and it seems I have my answer:



You do realize that is totally inaccurate given the fact players can hide their achievements on the Lodestone from anyone but themselves? So if this 'census' can take that information even when it's locked for viewing shows that this is virtually hacking and thus is a violation of the ToS. And minions? Not everyone bothers actually using the minion items believe it or not (many players find them annoying), so again this is NOT a good way of getting an accurate snapshot of the game.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this though.
To be a bit more thorough on the way that the person gathers the info (if it is the same person who has done the last few and using the same method) it is done by scraping the lodestone with 2 passes.

Active is determined to be any CHARACTER (as it is impossible to determine account association at this time) above level 10 that has had any change at all to their lodestone profile between the previous unofficial census and either of the 2 passes through the PUBLICLY available lodestone data. This includes any new minions , mounts, a change of job, any gain of levels, any new achievments, or even a single change in gear. So in order to be listed as inactive you need to have not done anything at all since April (the last time they did this) making it a fairly accuracte gauge for the number of active characters. Keep in mind that this means that if someone were to have multiple characters that they are active on this would count as more than 1 therefor the active subs are less than the total of active characters (though I would say probably less than 10% of people have played actively on 2+ chracters so it should be within negligible amounts)