it could be a gm / dev testing an illusion and seeing how popular it is. or its a gm / dev working on something and you happen to see them. the powers that be can monitor and get email alerts for just about everything in game. ; amount of plat at any given time , who killed a specific named and when. not to mention the ability to access all logs and copy any player toon. I play another game that lists the # of players on the server. im sure the gm's can access that info easier then casting illusion and counting every couple of hours. not to mention it wouldn't be a valid census. I remove all illusions unless its something new and pretty cool. ( I liked the tumbleweed )
Many years ago luclin.org used to somewhat track the number of players on luclin by doing blocks of /who and writing the results to a log and then parsing it. The site is still there but obviously hasn't been touched in many years. But considering how often he was on I think he had a pretty good idea of real rough numbers back in the day. I'm pretty sure Sony knows exact numbers, for some reason I somewhat remember the login screen with the servers having population numbers and at some point they removed it (around the time WoW came out). Or am I remember wow? Time blurs for me since I started to play.
To get the most accurate count of those online, I'd think you would need to do a /who <zone> for all zones. This should catch all the anon/role people but may well need to break that down to /who <zone> <class> for those zones with enough people to exceed the who list limit. So much easier back when "/who all count" worked, but SOE decided they didn't want anyone to be able to easily extract population numbers once those numbers started dropping.
