Not really. I do recall Badspot PMing Kalphiter that he would be banned from the master server when he posted bogus data to it. I don't know if faking the player count would count as posting bogus data though.
What was actually done is as soon as the first packet was sent, it would send another packet to revise the previous one.
It really wouldn't have worked well for typical use anyway, because it wasn't very dynamic.
Everything that could be faked was faked, player and brick count (you could lie about the map and no one would care), but I was actually hosting a server so it was of course somewhat legit.
Poll