I appreciate your level responses. I will look into your above claims. This one specifically though:
He provides these numbers but he absolutely didn’t say these were server specific numbers or averages per server, or really quantify what they meant exactly. Given the player numbers at the time I am more inclined to believe these numbers are totals across all servers as opposed to averages. That said, it still doesn’t really prove anything about vanilla populations vs current populations? He gives us averages for any particular night in the US. As I said, there were a lot more vanilla realms than there are classic realms. So we could get the number of realms at the time of this video and then Divide Mr. Kaplan’s numbers up among them, which would give us an average per realm. The trouble here is we don’t have any data for averages from Blizzard for classic to compare it to? Please let me know if I am incorrect there. Again, maybe I am still just missing your point with this video, but I still don’t think it proves anything one way or the other.
Edit: As a follow up to your other responses.
This is a known change to the API that we can track because we can see the change in the API that confirms SendWho() was moved to a protected function, yes. ManualWho() still works with hardware input. Agreed.
Yes, we can see what the addon is doing, but we don’t have any way of confirming that data is accurate at this point. We are assuming it is, since it’s coming from Blizzard, but we don’t know how the backend responds to multiple requests of this type at this point. For all we know, once an obvious attempt to poll useable census data from a server (multiple specific requests) is detected, measured results are given. That’s the problem, we just don’t know what was changed on the back end.
They certainly do. Can you please provide the quote from an official source stating that this has changed in particular? I can’t find one.
They absolutely did, you confirmed it yourself above with the move of SendWho() to a protected function. That was a change we could track. We have no way to confirm changes we cannot track.
Please provide an official source stating that our current census data is 99.9% accurate as you claimed above. I can’t find one.