Quote Originally Posted by Kuwagami View Post
The counting is done with public informations one cannot hide. Levelling up, getting minions and mounts, etc... gathered on characters that are above lv20-ish over 2 month or so. This is actually way more accurate than anything else we an have actually as SE refuses to give real data.

The last estimation was about 650k players iirc.
I know it's public data, I also know it's scraped from the Lodestone. I'm just saying that the numbers may be an under-estimate because it's difficult to gauge activity of players who are not progression minded, and take their time. I guess it depends on the kind of depth that they go to when obtaining their data. If they obtain the class page from your character summary information on Lodestone, and keep the previous record for a comparison, then they could even compare the number of XP, not just the levels. If they are going to that kind of dept than any concerns I have had in the past would be gone.