How many people are REALLY still playing Maplestory?

And should we care? (Someone else brought this up but I thought it was interesting) Folks toss around population numbers and such but what if a small or large portion of remaining players are hackers/bots?

I took a sample of 7000 active characters.
Over 1200 were obviously bots.

I shared this finding on the Nexon forums and was promptly permabanned and my thread was deleted.