Good explanation here, but this part:
Can be solved with battlemetrics. You can see how many are online at a time, around the clock, everyday. Now, we also used to have more data on there, until Funcom went and blocked steam player lists and went with their own Funcom Live Services. Now we cant see the actual players on the server, just the number. Ill never understand why they did this (well, a good theory was to hide the names of hackers so you cant track them down).