It's not anything new, xinn has demanded that type of data since many years (mostly from servers that didn't buy any paid services) and when one refused and decided to remove themselves from otservlist instead, he would often go to the public forum to defame that server.
@Iryont could probably tell you a word about that. And as you very well know, at the same time xinn kept on the list servers that were many times proven to had been putting fake characters in game (mostly those that bought paid services).
At some point, the otservlist's buisness model was literally based on pushing server owners to compete in (usually fake) online numbers and then charging them for that (you had to pay to even be on the list if you exceeded a certain number of "players" online). He was partly responsible for the spoof-fiesta and never seemed to care that it was misleading for the actual players and otserlist's users. So, after all those years, otservlist has zero credibility in that matter. Besides, its advertising value is also close to zero nowadays. We're not in 2006 anymore, and there is no reason to even be on the list today.
Even that new feature you've posted here is totally misleading. It says "unique players" and "number of multi-clients", but how can he even tell that? You can say it's "unique IPs" and "repeated IPs" at best, that would be correct. But a shared IP address does not imply the use of a multi-client, nor does using different IP addresses imply no use of a multi-client. Seeing such basic mistakes one has to question whether it's done purposely or he's just clueless in that topic overall.
Fun fact: it had 10x more upvotes than the second most upvoted suggestion. Another fun fact: I was banned for my activity in that thread.
Xinn first called me "Goebbels" there, implying that I was making propaganda. So I replied to every point he made and proved that he was the one making propaganda, and then I ironically called him back "mr. Goebbels" ... and I got banned by Don Daniello for that. While xinn didn't even receive any warning points originally. Don Daniello also ignored all my private messages where I politely asked what exactly I was banned for. It was only Kaspar who said in that thread that I was banned for "calling xinn nazi" (sic!).
After that, the otland staff closed the topic and added xinn's answers to my first post, as if they were decisive (the same answers that were already proven wrong). Finally, they decided that instead of doing something with that board, like the vast most of the active otland community asked, it was better to just give a mod position to xinn's employee - who, since then, made 30 posts in 2 years and a half (great change).
Just use server gala board:
Server Gala (https://otland.net/forums/server-gala.43/)
It generally gives a much closer-to-a-fact picture of a server. There's always some trolls, but they are usually taken care of, from what I can tell. Having such a thread is many times better than being on otservlist. Though, sadly otland seems to become less and less activate lately.
Anyway, as I said above, there is no reason to use otservlist in 2024. It made sense back in 2006 when servers where hosted on private computers, they had no website, you connected to them via IP changers, and their IP would change very often or they would simply go down forcing you to look for another one. But OT servers are not anything like that anymore, and for today's standards it's obsolete and useless.
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