I thought he meant it was broken for players trying to use the function, not the addon.
It is just generic /who is broken. Because the addon is constantly trying to run /who queries and creates a backlog. If the addon isn’t scanning tho, no problem.
I have seen a couple of misconceptions in this thread.
First is how Census data can lead to people knowing how many player accounts are active.
Assuming you could get enough client machines doing Census across all realms (at the same time or 24/7) you could come up with oh 50 million characters.
That tells you nothing.
Is it 50 million active accounts, or is it 1 million active accounts, or some indeterminate number in between.
No one in the financial community would even think to use such sloppy data for any planning.
Second is that somehow using /who is a burden on the servers.
Here is how this function works.
First you send a single packet query to the server.
Second the server processes the query until it reaches just 50 results.
Then it send a single packet back to the client.
This is very low resource requirements, the 2nd is the most intensive…
And Blizzard has for a long time had a load preventer built in. If the inbound packet queue gets too high, they just drop the packet and you get no response.
While I can not say I have never seen a dropped query.
I can say I have never seen CensusPlus impacted enough to be noticeable, even when peak loads (Expansion launches for example) were on the servers.
Right from nearly day one Thirteen plus years ago CensusPlus has had a built in delay to keep us from being a load problem, and when Wholib was built to help addons like Wim and others to safely interact on the same client with CensusPlus running that delay was loaded into the library for the same reason.
ClassicCensusPlus will be resurrected some time this year. But it will permanently suffer from resurrection sickness … and run as slow as molasses due to the HW event requirement.
It probably will run so slow that realms with highest active player levels will not get a complete census run during the census takers play session.
The only bright side of this is that gold sellers who often copy pasted much of the core of CensusPlus to make their addons will see the code as worthless.
Though I can already see how they could use the minimum functionality already available through macro key interaction… it just won’t be worth their time.
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Wrong, you can accurately get account numbers playing currently. Scan every hour or two and plot a graph. This will show peak account(would say player, but there are lots of multiboxers) counts. Also, there are very few classic servers. This would be very easy to accomplish. Even your average gold farmer has a dozen accounts… The point is that if you see an average of 20k people per server, during prime time, and then over time, that count drops to 10k people per server, during prime time, it’s usually a good indicator that roughly half of the players either aren’t playing anymore or aren’t playing as often. And yes, financial communities DO use information like this to place their “bets.”
This isn’t a big deal at all and has existed just fine for 15 years. The /who command has an internal cooldown to it on the server itself. Try shift+clicking names in chat real fast. You’ll see what I mean. The server will ignore you if you do it too frequently.
That’s not how this works. Every time you try to send the /who command, it gets sent with your packet payload. Whether or not the server cares is another story. Like I said, the servers have internal cooldowns on how often they will even look at, let alone, respond to your requests.
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Its a shame. I searched their site for my old guilds and was able to look up old guildies from back on BC and Wrath. Then found a few playing classic.
Fight the issue like blundering ogre instead of finesse of a marksman hunter.
ClassicLFG still works, just fyi
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Very well, too. I get good groups every day through it. Ones I don’t even see in the LookingForGroup channel. It helps a ton to get good groups while avoiding all the spam in the LFG channel.