Racial distribution, July 2021 (Luckybancho)

[Big_Bap]

To be fair:
- Lucky Bancho doesn't post his reports monthly. He does it once per 3 months.
- We don't know how exactly he fetchs this data, so we can't say if he does it in a single day or not.
- It takes several days to form report itself (data was aquaired at July 13th, but report was posted at 18th), so by the moment report is public it's already a little bit outdated.

That said, I think there're no ways to get 100% correct data anyway - the only people who has it are SE themselves. Reporters like Lucky Bancho just provide us some general data that helps to understand the direction in which the game goes with some trends in content and other things. So yeah, it's an estimate with some errors to it (or innacurate bur reliable in a good faith, as you called it).

Being outdated is not the problem.

He is most definitely using website scraping to get the information out of the Lodestone. That process is automated and the lodestone being absolutely horrible when it comes to loading pages, it is very frequent to end up with loading errors. Those errors are not a big deal... if he even cares to scrape those pages again (we don't know if he does). Then there's also the reliability of his crawlers. How frequently does the information that is being pulled from the lodestone is "saved" for the wrong character? Does he even bother to fix that? Does he do any kind of data validation? Cross-references with previous character history?

I do the very same thing he does with Free Companies and it takes a solid week to come up with a report that is 99.99%/100% accurate.

You are correct about trends, but your original post didn't contain such nuance.

[Halivel]

Being outdated is not the problem.

He is most definitely using website scraping to get the information out of the Lodestone. That process is automated and the lodestone being absolutely horrible when it comes to loading pages, it is very frequent to end up with loading errors. Those errors are not a big deal... if he even cares to scrape those pages again (we don't know if he does). Then there's also the reliability of his crawlers. How frequently does the information that is being pulled from the lodestone is "saved" for the wrong character? Does he even bother to fix that? Does he do any kind of data validation? Cross-references with previous character history?

I do the very same thing he does with Free Companies and it takes a solid week to come up with a report that is 99.99%/100% accurate.

You are correct about trends, but your original post didn't contain such nuance.

Added a comment on that in main post, thanks.