what is on screen shows number of players bot sees in range, adr never used auth server for anything.
Back to maybe 2 years ago, off servers still allowed unauthed access to direct server stats (c_version with proto -3), and when covid hit chronos/naia/classic was at its online cap of 5.5k-6k most of the day. L2j ppl might be unaware, but off servers had login queue added many years ago, because servers were often full (back when game was still doing good).