September Census

[Zojha]

Maybe discrepancy is ppl that got achievement but never used minion to add it.

Well, LuckyBancho uses the minion tab on the lodestone to get his data, so if that was the case, it should be the one with the lower number. We have no idea how this one got its data, so.../huh.

The lodestone lets people hide much of their data so any data you get from it is immediately suspect.

IIRC, you can't hide minion data on there (feel free to correct me on that one) and there is little reason to assume someone would not add a free minion that clogs up inventory space to their repertoire - you can't even sell it after all, so what else would you do with it? That's why these surveys (typically) look for minions you get from certain quests to see how many people did it. I wager similar goes for things like race and GC affiliation.
I'm not particularly fond of using the latest MSQ step as activity criterion either, tho. In general, many things are locked behind the MSQ, so it's natural to assume an active player would follow it to some degree, but I know all too many people who didn't bother with Nidhogg normal because it got a bad wiping reputation and the only thing locked behind it is NidEx.

I don't think excluding pure crafters from the active player criterion is too bad, though - crafting is a solitary activity, not a group activity, so even if you had 20 million active crafters online at all times, queues for group content would suffer nonetheless. And the social value of procuring goods is entirely artificial, as all crafting exclusive goods could easily be sold by an NPC (we could name it Market Board!) instead - for the most part, the interaction partners probably wouldn't even realize the difference, as the market board already is how crafters interact with most people.

I believe it's a difference of HOW we want to improve raiding and make it appeal to a wider subset of people than just the narrow sliver that's currently passing it.

"As of late October, at least about 50% of players who are actively playing battle classes have completed all four parts of normal Alexander Gordias." - Yoshida in a Famitsu interview translation on 3.1.

Literally all it took for wider appeal was to reduce the difficulty and put it in DF. Which isn't surprising at all, because against what people claim, the difficulty has always been the cause for the low participation - even the requirement of fixed groups/statics is ultimately caused by the difficulty. So the answer to appeal is easy, obvious and empirically proven - people just don't like it, because it goes against what the content is meant to be in their eyes. Hence, hourlong debates how to fix a problem without touching the cause.