An account tied login to check a numbers feed is innocuous, dosen't follow Hitech's style for almost 20 years. Telling Hitech to update his resume is a bit presumptuous, perception on the Internet is as damaging as the utopian illusion of transparency which always ends up biting you in the kester courtesy of agenda driven unhappy trolls. Doing nothing, which requires the subscriber to invest 3 minutes to check the numbers. In the long run is a neutral answer to the real dangers of real people who troll the Internet to damage businesses becasue they can. We get them passing through constantly posting a shopping list of negativity based on their personal historic beefs with Hitech. Under any pretext they can leverage to publicly harm Hitech with their negative opinions about Hitech's management and his business decisions.
Everyone knows what our numbers are by just being a regular customer and the trolls know the numbers by being friends with active players or just lurking in the forums. At some point one of those unhappy trolls would leverage those real time numbers in one of their screeds against Hitech. Back to my comment about innocuous and logins. Official to the minute numbers are the danger of perception and how transparency when it's not necessary kicks you in the teeth. Trolls talking to friends who still play the game are spreading second hand info perceptually.
When there was 400 players a night there was no real time feed and some people would then argue it would have been a good thing becasue those kinds of numbers would be incredible advertising. But, on the home page you never saw a real time counter feed way back then.