DayZ servers advertise
millions of players.
Right now the servers we track claim 4,459,793 players between them. Measured, about 2,163 of those exist.
How the padding works
Your launcher does not ask the server how busy it is and take its word on faith - it sends a standard Steam query and reads the reply. The reply contains a byte for the current player count. Padding tools sit in front of that reply and rewrite the byte before it leaves the machine.
Nothing else changes. The server can be completely empty. It costs the operator nothing, it is sold by some hosts as a feature, and every server list that simply repeats what it was told will show the invented number.
The servers confess in their own replies
The same reply that carries the player count also carries a count of bots - AI players. DayZ does not have them. The engine never fills a server with AI, so an honest DayZ server reports zero bots, always.
Every padding tool we have measured writes its invented number into the bot field as well as the player field. It is not a clever forgery. The server states, in the same breath, that it has 127 players and that 127 of them are bots.
Some do not even respect the engine limit
DayZ caps a server at 127 slots. 100,749 of the servers we track advertise more than that - capacities of 160, 190, 255 - and report themselves comfortably full on it. A number the game cannot produce is not a mistake, it is an invention that nobody bothered to bound.
What this site does about it
We query every tracked server every 15 minutes and keep the raw advertised numbers exactly as they arrive - a server claiming more players than the engine can host is evidence, and rounding it off would destroy the proof. Then the padding is detected: declared bots, impossible capacities, a claimed crowd the server cannot name a single member of, and counts that never move the way a living population moves.
Flagged servers are hidden from the rankings, the homepage totals, the trending list and the public API. Their pages carry a warning that says which rule caught them. The flag is not a punishment and not permanent - it clears itself as soon as the server shows a real population again.
Rankings here are measured, never sold. That is the entire point of the site: if the numbers can be bought, none of them mean anything.