You see, I happened to note that the Mage Class Lead for my progression guild in Classic and TBC Classic was back on the Myzrael-US server, leveling a new toon.* The few times I'd been on Myz after the server opened up for free transfers to Old Blanchy were disheartening to say the least; I wandered Stormwind and other places without anybody in sight.
So, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to create a new Cardwyn and hop on. I figured that if nothing else, anybody who was still on that server --and who knew me-- would take note.
Well, Northshire Valley went as well as I kind of expected:
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| At least it's not zero... |
Still, I did kind of expect it would be about "one" (me).
I did take notice of the server population in Wrath Classic's server listings:
It seems that even what were "large" servers when I stopped raiding and eventually abandoned Wrath Classic back in January 2023 are no longer that: Atiesh, Grobbulus, and Whitemane were all "High" or "Full" back then, but are now on par with the one destination server for Myzrael and the other abandoned servers: Old Blanchy.
The few times my Questing Buddy had gone onto Atiesh after her raiding career there ended --roughly November 2023-- she'd reported back that there were a lot fewer people logging in than there used to be. I hopped onto Atiesh myself and found Dalaran still fairly full with 50+ people in the /who listings, but it definitely felt not as crowded as before.
I kind of chalked it up to the end of the expansion, as very few people would ever confuse Ruby Sanctum (the current raid Wrath Classic is on) as a filler raid between ICC and the drop of the Cataclysm pre-patch.
Still, I wondered. Both Wrath Classic and Retail are in the end of the expac blues right now, but what does that mean for, well, the new player experience?
So I did what I usually do: create a new character and go look around and see who's there.
***
Oh, you can stop with the fake shock now.
Yes, I did create a few toons on Retail.
No, none of them were named Cardwyn.**
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| Nice mutton chops, dude. You'll give Mungo Jerry a run for his money. |
I figured I'd go to Area 52, my Horde toons' old stomping ground, and see what popped up when I started a new toon.
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| Uh.... |
Okay, that wasn't good. There's nobody in Eversong in the /who...
Wait. Do you see it?
There are at least two other toons right by me here, so why aren't they showing up in /who?
They're not on the same server as me --I checked-- so is it a scenario that only people on the same server as you show up in /who? If that's the case, then that means that nobody from Area 52 has a toon in Eversong Woods.
Okay, I'll freely admit --and I told my Questing Buddy as much-- that Area 52 might be a mature enough server that just about everybody is a max level toon. I mean, it is "Full" after all. So maybe I need to start poking around on a server marked for "New Players". A brand new player won't know any better, and with the server clusters in place in Retail (and Classic Era) this shouldn't be a big deal.
So I chose the first server on the list, Aegwynn, and rolled up a few toons.
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| Since when were Tauren allowed to become Mages? |
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| A server specifically marked for New Players, and Azshandra was already taken? Oh COME ON... |
A couple of the toons I started on the "new" new player experience of Exile's Reach, but I discovered that the "ship" I was on had almost nobody aboard:
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| There is the lone toon I discovered on either faction on the boat. "We're on the Good Ship Lifestyle! I elect me the captain!" |
Well, at least I got a chuckle out of the Alliance captain saying "The Alliance leaves no one behind!" in a weird echo of something I once wrote in one of the stories concerning Card and the Defias.*** But still, there was nobody around.
Except for this:
As you can see, there's three toons there --there were more if I rotated the screen around-- but none of them were the ones who showed up in /who.
I mean, something as basic as /who for a zone couldn't be this busted, could it?
Could it?
I got onto my Banking toon in WoW Classic Era, the only WoW instance in Classic that has server clusters, and got this for a listing in Elwynn Forest:
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So what the hell is going on?
***
Yes, it's a bug. Apparently it's been around in Retail for several years now, judging by some of the comments in the WoW forums.
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| This makes the date of the bug introduction to around January 2020 or so, as 8.3 dropped on January 14th. Screencap from "/who function still not working?" |
How has this been allowed to persist for this long? Obviously it works fine in WoW Classic Era, so this ought to be a no brainer to actually get corrected. It is also something very basic to the game, being able to find other people nearby, and if you can't even do that, why should people think you've got a quality product that people use?
Before someone hops on and says "yeah, but Blizz has bigger problems than fixing /who", I can unequivocally state that being able to find people in a game where playing with other people is the desired goal is a high priority. And if you can't trust the results of a simple /who command, then how can we trust the rest of what the game is providing to us?
This is a horrible look for Blizzard to provide to new players. WoW already has major problems with bringing in new people, and making populations look even worse than they really are does them no favors. I was originally going to mention about how nobody was starting new players in Retail, but I can't say that. There is absolutely no way of knowing without me taking a higher level toon and coming back to a starter zone to manually look around and see for myself.
For all of the problems that Blizzard has with story and retention and systems, it's the small stuff that annoys me the most. The small annoyances that say "this is not a polished product" before you even run into the story or other issues make me wonder why I'm paying $15/month. If the game can't even have the basics work right --or if they only care about getting combat tuned to the point where nothing else is reliable-- why should I play the game? Why should a new player play it?
Or maybe Blizzard thinks that the only people who play Retail now are those who already had been playing it, and they have an excessively high tolerance for poor product quality?
Either way, this is a bad look for Retail.
*Yes, we're still Battle.net friends. We haven't spoken in quite a while, but we're still friends.
**My Questing Buddy did ask me if I had. I told her no, because I would spend a lot of time trying to customize her to get her "just right", and I was more interested in taking a look around.
***Here's the excerpt:
"Is our mutual friend still here?" I asked."She's likely in the park where the Cenarions are, sleeping it off." With a mischievous grin, Sloan patted her hair. "It's a wig, Card. That's why I keep my hair short.""Oh." For a moment I thought she had a spell cast on her."Don't sound so disappointed; not everything is Arcane related. It fooled you, didn't it?" Sloan turned toward Mom and inclined her head. "We protect our own, Ma'am. It's an honor to finally meet you," she added."Oh?" Mom arched an eyebrow."Yes, Ms. Gray." Sloan's normal equanimity vanished. "I've read so much about you. The Vintner made sure you were restored to your proper place within the organization. And...""And?" I'd never heard Mom slip into a voice quite like this before. Whenever she had us kids do something around the house, her tone was a completely different. This sounded like a Sergeant whipping some green trainees into shape."We..." Sloan paused, then her reply came in a rush. "We study you, Ma'am. What you did, and how you did it. And because of you, we are taught to never leave anyone behind. If that makes us weaker than our enemies, then so be it. But it makes us better than them."Mom nodded. "Thank you....""...Sloan. Sloan McCoy, Ma'am." Sloan swallowed hard."Thank you, Sloan. That means more to me than you'll ever know." Mom reached across me and clasped a surprised Sloan by the shoulder. "Let's not keep the Vintner waiting."
"yeah, but Blizz has bigger problems than fixing /who"
ReplyDeleteIt's more that I wouldn't expect new players to even know about /who? I know I didn't back in the day. I don't see that as having anything to do with the new player experience. There's probably an interesting post to be made about all the problems with the new player experience in retail WoW, but that would actually require you to play. 😉
Also worth noting that servers don't operate the same way in retail as in Classic. Server-clusters like we have in era do also exist, but beyond that, people can play and interact with people from all servers - cross-realm zones were added in MoP, so I would've expected you to remember those. To be honest I'm not surprised that this messes with /who.
Because of that, what server you're on is pretty inconsequential in retail. I think the only things that are not fully cross-realm at this point are mythic raiding and guilds, and the latter are being fixed for War Within. Did you check the same starting zone in quick succession on different servers? I would expect you to see the same people.
Oh, and...
Since when were Tauren allowed to become Mages?
The Dragonflight pre-patch!
The thing is, the server grouping has been that way in Retail for a long time, since before the last patch of Battle for Azeroth. You can't even blame the problems with /who on cross-faction grouping, as that came about in Shadowlands.
DeleteThere is obviously data present that can tell you what players are visible in a zone, as people are visible; it's a matter of putting that data into a player's hands. Like I told Pallais, if you come in to a brand new MMO and you ask who is playing nearby in a "say" or "tell" or whatever, people will tell you to go and basically pull up the Social button and put a query in the Who tab. If that doesn't work and hasn't worked for four years, why do you still have it in the game?
It's just like the companion pathing issue that I still have in SWTOR. If you want to know the real reason why I rarely play SWTOR, it's that: if my companion can't even stay with me in game but instead is somewhere about 50 to 100 meters behind me, wandering around somewhere, why should I play the game? I periodically get on and play until I can't stand it anymore, which is somewhere toward the end of Chapter 1. It's been that way since roughly 2016 or so, and even migrating to a new PC and a different graphics card manufacturer and a new CPU hasn't helped it one bit. Corso is still wandering around back at the place where we landed in Alderaan and couldn't be bothered to keep up while I'm out dealing with Thuls.
if you come in to a brand new MMO and you ask who is playing nearby in a "say" or "tell" or whatever, people will tell you to go and basically pull up the Social button and put a query in the Who tab
DeleteI'll take your word for it, but I don't think I've ever seen that question/conversation take place in any chat in my almost two decades of playing MMOs. New players generally worry about others only in so far as they can see them, or if they struggle and need help, in which case the question I usually see is "Can anyone help with X?" not how to locate random strangers in a specific zone...
I've actually seen that question posed quite a bit on Era servers, along the lines of "how can I tell who is in the same area as me", especially when people are trying to get groups together for Deadmines and they want a specific type of player. What that tells me is that these are people new to WoW --or haven't played in so long that they forgot how to do certain things.
DeleteI didn't see that so much on original 2019 Classic, because the overwhelming majority of people I encountered there used to play the game and came back for Classic, and again not as much in Season of Discovery. Era, however, seems to be more of a landing spot for people new to the game.
I'd have to second Shintar there. I think /who is most definitely an "Experienced Players Only" command. Honestly, I doubt many genuinely new players would even know slash commands existed, let alone what ones there were.
DeleteOf course, that leads into the thorny question of what really counts as a "New Player". How many people are going to be playing WoW (Any flavor) as their first MMORPG in 2024? It's an old game for old people now. I'd guess most "new" players would be old players returning or players who'd played other, similar games already. They would know about /who, although whether any of them would feel the need to use it for anything other than curiosity (Literally the only reason I have ever used it, I think.) is harder to say.
Maybe, given the current state of the genre and the game, the answer from Blizzard's point of view would be not to fix /who but to remove it from Retail altogether?
I suspect that since MMOs are no longer popular in the same way they once were that we have written them off as being for old people.
DeleteIt's the same sort of conventional wisdom that gets turned on its head when a Baldur's Gate 3 comes out and disproves the "everybody knows" wisdom that turn based RPGs are dead.
While I think MMOs' time in the sun has come and gone, MMOs have made themselves deliberately obscure by becoming insular in approach and understanding what it means to attract new players in 2024.
I had a neighbor's kid try WoW back when Cataclysm first came out, and they gave up because they couldn't understand a thing about the story in game. That speaks to me of major problems with how the story is presented, and that the people doing the writing don't look at things from the standpoint of someone brand new to the genre and the story.
I think one of the problems is how do you define a "new" player? Is it someone like my wife who knows about Wow, but would struggle with WASD and/or mouse movement and wouldn't know about /who unless told? Is it someone with modern gaming experience on, say, consoles, but doesn't have much PC or MMO experience? "New" isn't a point, but a range of experiences shading up from none -- which makes new player experiences so damn hard to calibrate for any company. Until there's a standard definition of "new" all new player experiences are going to have issues from different points of view. :sigh:
ReplyDeleteYou know what that sounds like?
Delete“It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”
I mean, I get what you're saying, but when people ask in game how do they find people in Durotar, the easiest and long standing way in a lot of MMOs to find out is to tell somebody to select the Social button (or equivalent) and go to the Who tab and type in the name of the zone. If that doesn't work, then what do you tell them? Saying "it's complicated" doesn't help things much.
It was bad enough that when I logged in to one of my Area 52 toons who were at a capital city and saw this obnoxious scrawl of Trade (Services) blowing by you at such speed that the data is absolutely worthless --the consequences of a Full server, as none of the other servers had this issue-- but when you try to make sense of what you've got using the in-game tools you have, you find out they're broken.
Oops! Hadn't read Pallais' comment before I added my reply above. What Pallais said!
DeleteI wonder if the lack of a Newcomer Chat channel is why I see it so often in Era. Although to be fair, I didn't see it much at all in the 2019 Classic servers through Wrath Classic. As I alluded to above, I figured it was because returning players made the bulk of that Classic contingent.
Delete