Well yeah, and some of that 45% could be old players who hadn't played since December. Still seems like a huge spike!
Yes, it is a marked change in activity for the game and speaks volumes of the power of popular audiovisual media in dragging in butts following their eyeballs.
Yeah, it is hard to formulate given just the API numbers. But either way you can see how strong a little marketing for this game goes! Now if we only had TotalBiscuit come back and the game picked up by a few news locations...