How many people are REALLY still playing Maplestory?

how many people actually play the original DotA? Don't confuse dota 2 with Defense of the Ancients.

Plenty but most are shifting to Dota 2 slowly.
But that seems like a completely irrelevant point. It's the same game in a new skin. It's the same players playing the same game with updated graphics, with new players joining, thus the continued growth.

But for the point of an old game keeping, and hell in this case still growing its playerbase it's a perfect example.
WC3 dota and dota2 still recieve the exact same patches and the goal is 1:1 parity.

I've played dota since 2005, i'm not confusing one thing with another at all.

And even if we were to only look at dota1 then it was still going incredibly strong until sometime last year during the official realease of dota2 where it finally began properly bleeding users in regions such as china and SEA. Those users went to dota2 which is the same game with a new skin though, so it's not like they quit the game because they got bored of it or because they disliked the direction it was headed in, which is what this thread is about. They just wanted to play the same game but with better graphics and easier accessibility in regards to a lot of things.