Does that mean that if you find yourself ranking 1501 on the Roster in the game, there's at least that number of players having been active during that tour?
Yes, at least 1501
pilots had been ranked in that particular category. I insist on saying 'pilot IDs', because we can't actually track the players, just the pilot ID's they are using and a single player can have more than one 'pilot ID' associated with him (though I believe that secondary or 'shade' account are actually relatively rare compared to many other games).
Of course, among those ranked will be those who downloaded the game, spawned once, couldn't get their plane in the air and were never seen again. For my statistics, I only track pilots with at least one registered kill or death, which will be always a somewhat lesser number.
