When looking in races it says there are 3885 (at this time) players.Are there really this many players or does this include past players that died,or doent play anymore?

That number means living characters in the game. at any one time between half and 2/3rds will probably be inactive for one reason or another (haven't logged in in a week or more) Those reasons vary from not playing any longer to having to cram for mid-terms or finals.

That is very intersting thanks Kyria

Its been said in some other thread recently, its number of currently active players.

Lilith is correct. That is the number of active players in the game. Once a player has not logged in for 7 days they will be removed from that count, but you must also consider those individuals who are coming back from inactivity. It's a continuing cycle with individuals having varied degrees of activity. Some may be very active and on IRC and the forums while others may log in every few days just to move their ship. They're still "active" but not very.

EDIT: Numbers!

I just counted 180 factions and 18 governments. That would require 2,340 players to keep afloat...

about 1.5k freelancers!

Elijah was just listing the minimum numbers required to keep those factions/governments afloat

At one point it used to say "active members" instead of just "members." For some reason the "active" word was taken out a while back, but it still means the same thing.

We have over 500,000 total accounts, Veynom said at one time.

There goes my impression of swc as a community, family driven game>.>

Probably at least 75,000 are banned

of whom at least 5000 are John Daygon (please note this is not a real figure, merely a rough estimate.)

Yeah more like 7,000