Wish this was fixed as well. >.<
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Adding my name to the list. This hasn’t worked properly for at least a year. I’ll even type someone’s exact name who is online and it won’t come back with anything.
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We really could use some feedback on this. Is it going to be fixed or has it been given up on? Is there some workaround that we’re not aware of?
It’s made trying to do Mythic Plus and organise casual raids damned near impossible.
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I agree, is this going to be fixed? I just re-subscribed after 3 years away from the game, and it is a very unpleasant feeling to be looking for people and /who never pulls up anyone. It is not a good look for the game (for which my realm is alreaddy fairly dead).
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2022 and Blizzard is still too incompetent to address or resolve the issue.
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Is this ever going to be fixed?
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It’s weird to see someone from your own realm and faction, max level, stand right infront of you yet not come up in the /who result.
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Yeah I find it frustrating that we get fixes for the AH so you can access it from mobile when we can’t even do a /who to find people to invite to dungeons or ginvite. Surely the issue can’t be that unresolvable?
Or if there’s some sort of logical reason for people’s names not being found then let us know what it is.
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Been experiencing this for a long time. 
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Please fix this, it gives such a bad image on the population of servers.
+1 has been an issue for awhile now. I’ve tried looking up a guild in the /who list and it only returns a fraction of the players that are actually online.
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They have changed how /who works quite a few times since wod, when people were speculating that it had been changed to keep players from using it to figure out how many people were actually playing the game. That might be part of the reason.
That is the reason for it. They ramped it up when classic came out because you could obtain server and region statistics that were around 90% accurate, due to there being so few servers at the time. People were debunking the health of the game too easily, so within a few weeks, Blizzard nerfed /who and added a bunch of cooldown mechanics to it. You’d see these “full” servers had like 5k people, A+H, online during peak hours and it wasn’t hard to do the math on the 20 other servers to get a rough total of actual players that stuck with it after the first couple weeks when the nostalgia goggles wore off.
Though if they were asked, they’d claim it was causing instability issues with the servers.
This break happened at the same time Blizzard moved their instance servers to Google’s Cloud. I assume the issue is directly related. Since that’s a major architectural change, I have no particular hope that this will be fixed. Not that it cannot be fixed, but that it will not be of sufficient priority to address it instead of other issues and content.
As much as I would like it to be.
Toward the end of wod we speculated that was why /who was broken in Tanaan jungle.
Another issue with /who became apparent when they started to implement sharding. Prior to that I belonged to the World Defense channel, that would notify you if a faction base of yours was under attack anywhere in the world, so you could go there to defend. I went to the Crossroads many times after receiving that message. After that, you were no longer notified of attacks, and even if you heard and went there, you might be in the wrong shard and unable to see what was happening in a different one, even if you had grouped with those players.
So the players who claim that they are attacking a base to try to get people to defend it? They are cowards who know that no one elsewhere will know that they are making the game unplayable to feed their fetish of harassing powerless noobs to show them what the “community” is really all about.
I find it hard to believe that it’s deliberately broken (this badly) just to stop census information. It’s not hard to mess with say “/who priest” to stop that. But when “/who charactername” doesn’t work and they’re standing next to you… that’s not stopping census, that’s a bug.
And I doubt it’s sharding for exactly the same reason. I can literally see the person but can’t /who them. That’s not to say that sharding isn’t also a problem but I don’t think it’s the sole cause.
Honestly, at this point it’d be easier to just remove the command altogether since it flat out doesn’t work most of the time.
Oh they did that too… They did it for all searches basically.
They were also using brute force searching, combined with tags for class and level and such, when the search panel would return 50+ results. So yeah, it makes sense that it rolls the dice for name searches as well.
Point is, it has been like this for years now and there’s a 99% chance it was intentional. People came far too close to figuring out the actual active population of the game, which spells disaster for investors and the game’s community itself(can lead into the whole mob mentality of everyone abandoning ship due to thinking the game is dying).
Again, that seems unlikely. Especially when sometimes it returns names and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems much more likely it’s a bug that’s been introduced. Either that or you’re saying that not only are they sabotaging /who but they’re randomly sabotaging it.
That’s what I meant by:
It has been like this for years, people have brought this up many times, Blizzard is well aware of the problem and it doesn’t take two years to fix a simple problem like this. It’s definitely working as intended, on their end, just not how we want it to on our end.
I suppose it is possible that they use some kind of a laggy snapshot updating system that only counts people as online if they’ve been online for more than X amount of time though, and that only updates the list on some fixed interval. However, I’ve never bothered to test for that.
I could see that being a thing. Like it only snapshots once every five minutes (for example) more easily than I could see them deliberately gimping “/who Carnacki”.
Side note: I would not be surprised if “/who priest” or “/who 60” was deliberately limited just not tighter searches. And if that is the case then they should own up to it.