Like a frog in a pot of water on a stove, I won't know my server is dead until it's too late.I hope they will at least take some action to stabilize post tourist server pops. Such as merging servers, or "force" people back to retail.I'm sure it'll all work out, it's Blizzard! ...right?
My bet is Blizzard did this to hide massive drop in classic population, they probably saw it internally and to hide that fact they are blocking addons that were collecting this information to prevent leak.
I thought /who was to see who was online and you could narrow it down by zone, level etc.I wasn't aware that it allowed addons to whisper people. That seems something like /tell would do..
There is one plot hole with the idea that this is being implemented to hide drops in population: census gathering mods don't erase data about characters that no longer exist. I'm a longtime user/contributer through the WoW Census mod, and I have characters that I can still look up that were deleted years ago. With such a short time period involved -- Classic isn't even a month old yet -- it's not going to be able to detect people who left early vs. people who simply haven't been caught in a census sweep and haven't been recorded.
I think they just got tired of the different ways C_FriendList.SendWho() indirectly got abused so they made it require a hardware eventThe gold spam channel invites were the last straw that broke the camel's back
wasn't Censur super inaccurate/misleading anyway? I'm glad people will now stop quoting an addon while talking about server population and faction balance
Good change.
Well, no wonder they want to hide the figures, considering the last census showed 4 million people playing Classic and the last educated guesstimate in retail showed a bit under 2 million players. I mean, what sort of company would want the world to know that a 15 year-old version was beating up the brand-new retail with double the playerbase, amirite?
Unfortunately this thread simply reinforces the stereotype that a large proportion of people who play WoW are paranoid conspiracy theorists who spend most of their time outside of reality and common sense due to usage of illicit substances! ;-) :-D
We did have census addons through vanilla though. So I don't think the reason behind this being the census addons, their breaking is likley a side effect to whatever was "fixed"
This has nothing to do with layer hopping and everything to do with finding out that Classic has twice as many people playing (around 4 million) compared to retail. Blizz, with their backward thinking, actually considers this negative information. Think about that.
This is in line with their policy of hiding as much information from players as they can. Really sad but no surprise
I'm gonna go start farming some ore because the amount of tinfoil used in the hats on these comments is wild.
This is ridiculous, the same addon performs the same function in retail and is regularly used by other 3rd party sites to attempt to determine the overall population levels of the game. Heck the armory API even allows direct pulls without needing to be in-game for retail.Why on Azeroth would they break this addon, something that's existed in retail wow for over a decade. Obviously they're trying to hide server population levels, there is NO OTHER REASON.Everyone saying that it can influence layer hopping, blizz already came out and directly addressed this by saying that a zone /WHO makes absolutely NO difference depending on which layer you are in.
It might be difficult to sway new investors if they could publicly find out how many people were playing.