Current Server Population?

Is there an easy way to get the number of players currently online per server (or better yet per faction per server)?

I could brute force it by steping through the entire list of characters on the server and checking their online status, but that seems like an awful lot of work and there should be a better way. I've tried doing queries with characters_world joined with characters_online_status but there doesn't seem to be anyway to limit that to only return matching results (and/or "outer=1" doesn't behave as I would expect).

I thought this would do it:
http://census.daybreakgames.com/get/ps2:v2/ch...^termsnline_status=1^outer=0&c:limit=100

But that still lists all characters and only includes the join if it matches.

This is what I really want to do:
http://census.daybreakgames.com/count/ps2:v2/...to:character_id^termsnline_status=1^outer=0

But that just returns how many total characters exist on the server.

 

Many people have sought after this data point--how many people are online, per world, continent, faction. I've asked around here at SOE and have been told we do not want to surface current population. Census users have asked before and we've said we don't provide population numbers. Some census users have found clever but inefficient ways to dig up rough numbers. The "official" SOE stand seems to be "please don't reveal current population numbers to the public". Sorry.

 

I can understand not wanting to expose how many people are on a particular continent, in a particular territory, etc because that could be abused, but total number of players online doesn't seems to be very sensitive information (at least in terms of game-play, though I suppose the reasons here have more to do with business).

What about just exposing the population percentages per faction per server (and possibly per continent), rather than the raw numbers? That information is readily available on the in-game map and would be nice to have for external developers as well.

 

Borderline tactical plots world populations on a 5min basis http://borderlinetactical.net/rsnc/world-population/
- I don't know how it is done, but assume the clever but inefficent methods were used to generate it.

Raw numbers can be got at: http://api.therebelscum.net/PlanetSide/