I’d receive at least two chat channel invites daily from gold spammers.
They simply wanted to break the census addons that people have been using for over a decade now. Suddenly now, why?
Occam’s razor. Put away your tinfoil hat. It has nothing to do with Blizzard wanting to hide player counts because they can’t accept Classic is doing better than retail, or to hide player counts that are discouraging players from realm transferring, etc.
Blizzard HATES gold sellers. People have been complaining about chat channel invites from gold sellers since week 1. When there isn’t anything in place to combat them (i.e. WoW tokens) they’re left with the alternative of breaking their advertisement automation.
We don’t know why exactly it was broken, but it definitely wasn’t to try to sabotage classic.
If it was even about hiding playerbase count (which I’m doubtful of that) the opposite would make a lot more sense. If it was publicly available that people are quickly quitting the game, a lot of people would bandwagon and also quit.
Occam’s Razor. It has entirely everything to do with Blizzard wanting to hide player counts and population info.
If blizzard hated gold sellers so much they would ban them more than once every year. They let them farm for 6-12 months, while sending hoards of gold off to their mule accounts while damaging the economy.
They don’t hate them enough to actively ban them, they wait and do it in waves under the guise of “gathering information” on how the bots work.
If you wanted to know, you’d just buy the bot for yourself and reverse engineer it and then break it that way.
Stop spreading this misinformation. /who NEVER allowed you to determine what layer you were in, or who was in your layer. Blizz even stated this.
Another popular theory is that you can determine your current layer by doing a /who in a capital city, and comparing the results against the /who your friend does. That doesn’t work because /who returns results from the entire realm, not just from your layer, and if the result set is too large it truncates the results before sorting them. This means every player gets different results, but those differences in result set have nothing to do with which layer you’re on. This has led some people to claim that they’ve discovered dozens of layers per realm, but that claim is completely false .
If you accepted the idea that they’re just trying to hide population counts (which is again, a bit of a stretch) why would they be doing it to sabotage classic rather than to make classic seem more popular than it really is to its players?
Now people can keep spamming their “Look all the servers have queues!!” threads even though they’ve slowly been reducing the scale of layering to keep with their phase 2 promise which in turn lowers realm pop cap.
You never had any problems? Just because you never had the issue happen to you doesn’t mean that this problem didn’t happen to other players.
I even took screenshots and I was going to make a thread about it. But it was my 1st time trying to post a link on the forums in over a year and I kept getting a forum message saying “can’t post links”. So I sent a support ticket with my screenshots directly to Blizzard instead.
Here’s my screenshot I made 2 or 3 weeks ago. https://imgur.com/a/3bk7k61
And don’t just take my word for it. Here are other complaints on the forums.