Players number

World of Warplanes, as everyone know, is a great success. Especially version 2.0, which is so big success, that Wargaming decided to take down counter of online players.
Yet there is still possibility to track number of players, although not all of them - Hall of Fame.
Although the Hall of Fame shows only 1000 players, it is possible to find how many players played given number of battles during given time period - there is a search option, that allows to find certain player, and there are columns that can be used. And it's not so hard as to do multiple copy and pastes from top to the bottom, skipping 3 players at a time.
Using 2 columns is quite useful - opening HoF in t2 tabs, in one sort by Win Ratio (first column), in the other - by Experience per battle (last column). This is determined by 2 factors - usually top win ratio have hardcore sealclubbers, killing planes at bottom tier, and there is increasing personal points to exp conversion rate through tiers.
So player playing at lowest tiers will have lower exp per battle ratio than player scoring similar amount of personal points at higher tiers.
So algorithm is like: take top players by WR, find their exp per battle - usually below 1k. Switch to the other tab sorted by exp per battle, find given sealclubber.
There is a good chance, that up or down there will be listed new players, that don't know the game, with much smaller Win Ratio - copy such player, switch to previous tab sorted by Win Ratio, and look for that player. Finding players with exceptional low WR (20% or below) or with exceptional low experience per battle (300-400 and below) should pretty fast reach the bottom of the table.

Now some real numbers:
- 1.x had average number of such weekly players at 7394 (between May 2016 and October 2017), lowest 5775, highest 12058 during giveaway of free plane during Gamescom 2017. Pretty wide threshold.
- immediately after release, WoWP 2.0 had 11831 weekly players, and quick and steady, with random changes due to events, it went down to levels below 1.x worst, like 4660 in 13-20 May 2018.
- heavy doctoring stats, using gold as a reward, allowed to bump numbers from 5381 at Nov 2nd 2018 (end of bombers event) to 4964 at 2.0.8 release at Nov 9th, then gold started to flow and at Nov 16th there were 6017 weekly players - rewards made to play 15% players more (or 20, depending at which number you look).
At Nov 15th there were 6134 - it shows, how much important is pay 4 play policy, and how big success WoWP 2.0 is.