Hey all,
There’s been a few bugs that affect the /who functionality over the last few months, causing it to not return the correct results. The results that are returned are generally from other players that are on the same shard as your character, so it appears incomplete.
These issues are being investigated by the QA and WoW teams, so hopefully we will see some improvements on this or have more info to share in the near future.
Thanks for all the reports!
I tested this out this week and it doesn’t appear to be completely the issue. I tried to /who a person on my realm and got 0 results, but they were definitely in the same shard as me as I could visually see them in Boralus. So I don’t think it is totally tied to shards.
And I double checked the spelling. I was even able to add them to my friends list afterwards, so I know the spelling was correct.
I would also like to chime in here, and let you know that this all started when you did the realm changes back in either august or early September. I don’t know if this is a database issue due to that, but it really seems tied into all those changes. Right after the new realm connections were updated, /who stopped working correctly. And it seems as though it got even worse after the expansion dropped. Now 90% of the time I’ll see someone talking in trade and do a /who and can’t find them. It’s extremely aggravating.
Take guild recruiting for instance, you see someone say something in trade, it’s bad enough often times players have special characters in their names (like me, yes I know) but then you go to try and check on their level, or if they are currently in a guild already, and you get the “0 players total” message.
I appreciate the response, but it has now been 5 months. Please keep checking and let us know, maybe once a week, what you are finding>
I had to type in the name- realm name to find someone hope this helps.
This has now been a problem for seven months.
Is this “working as intended”, like something to keep people from being harassed? I am honestly just throwing darts in the dark here because it seems like there is no definitive answer from Blizzard and there doesn’t seem to be any blue posts actually acknowledging the problem as stated.
Starting in early September of last year, typing /who followed by a person’s username began coming back with “0 players total” as though the person wasn’t online, even if you were sitting in Orgrimmar looking right at the person.
At that time it seemed like it was about half the people. Now it’s far worse. It is such a hindrance to doing group invites, professions, guild invites, the list goes on.
It is really that hard to figure out what the issue is, or to even acknowledge that yes this is a major problem and yes we are working on it? The last blue reply doesn’t seem to even remotely describe how bad the actual issue is.
EDIT: I should have mentioned, you can private message the person, that still works, and then look them up on their armory (if armory is working that day…)
April 2021 and Blizzard still hasn’t fixed this.
And they probably don’t plan on it. Makes it too easy for people to scan player activity and gauge the game’s sub count. This can then have financial ramifications in the real world with investors falsely jumping ship based on incomplete hearsay data.
My best guess is that it is at the very bottom of the “to do” list. It’s not game breaking.
This is been happening to me for a long time took about 10 minutes of messing around finally got into my guild…I see this was posted originally Sept 20 and no solution yet?
Use the /who g-guildName command format to see all chars online for a guild.
For checking a specfic char, such as a guild applicant or even low level chars below lvl 10, use the /who x-playerName command format, it works!
This avoids the /who bugs of getting half-of-the-guild-only results or often getting “0 players total” results!
See this post i made on the US Bugs Report forum:
Is there a version of one of those commands for people in a zone?
There are other qualifiers such as z- (zone), c- (class) and r- (race) and minlvl-maxlvl.
For example, you can enter a command such as /who z-"Korthia" c-Warlock r-human 57-60 and get a list of human warlocks lvl 57-60 in Korthia zone.
Note: The list will only include players on your own realm, not cross-realm players, and they will be a sub-set of the players that match that filter, not every one that matches.
The bug is that since 8.3 approx, all the /who results are a sub-set of the full list of players that match your filter criteria.
The bug is that it seems to take a hash value of your player name and return only a sub-set list of players that correspond to your player name.
So the unqualified name, zone, class, race and level filtered results only give you a sub-set of the full list, even if the full list would be less than the max 50 results!
This is confusing and annoying to everyone!
Only the ‘g-’ (guild) filter will give the full guild list of results and the x- (exact) filter will give you an exact player name matched result.
Note: the ‘g-guildName’ filter will return a list of all players logged-on in all guilds which have a match to guildname in their full guild name.
So you might see players in the results that are not in your guild but are in other guilds which have a similar guild name, which match on part of their guild name.
Note: The x- (exact) filter has never been documented but is the only filter that works for a specific player on your realm.
This is some excellent specific information, and I hope that the internal Blizz team takes note. In the meantime, those other modifiers appear to work great! Thanks man!
Jan 25 2022 problem still persists. At first I thought I couldn’t /who people on my BNet list (which in itself is a ridiculous bug but would at least narrow the issue), but even if I, for example, /who Maldraxxus, (as I did today), it returned 4 people. Pretty funny because there were at least 10 people standing around me. It comforts me though that the only blue post I’ve seen in this thread recognized the issue as a “recent months” problem even though it was a thing for over a year at the time they posted. Classic blizz customer service.
Ironically, doing a /who on a class/character/zone returning less than 10 confirms the game is dead to people feeling out the population. At the same time Blizz seems to be unapologetically trying to kill WoW. Not sure what their backup cash cow is but they definitely want this to end.
Confirming that this is still an issue.
This is extremely helpful, thank you for sharing!
this is still happening
Coming up on 2.5 years and no progress?
Let’s be honest, the /who function hasn’t worked properly in like 10 years.