Cortyn has found another flaw in World of Warcraft. The most important social features have been unusable for many years.
Okay, you know me a little by now. I like to complain on Mecker Wednesday about larger and smaller details. But sometimes you just need to let off steam. Today, there is again a topic that may not have caught the attention of many players so far:
The friends list in World of Warcraft has been broken for years.
I wasn’t even referring to the more or less regular outages of Battle.net services, where suddenly no Battle Tag friends are displayed anymore. I mean the completely normal friends list within World of Warcraft that we have had for about 16 years. Even in Battle for Azeroth, there were many errors, but now with Shadowlands, it has become even more absurd. Popular errors:
- The friends list does not update the status of players. Although a friend has been offline for hours, he continues to be displayed as online.
- The friends list does not reliably update the location of players. You can message friends who have been standing in Oribos for hours, only to find out that they have actually been in Castle Nathria for a while.
- Especially absurd: Sometimes the friends list even rearranges itself randomly. Then it is suddenly not sorted by online status or alphabetically, but somehow randomly. I then have to scroll through the entire list to see who is actually online.
- When adding a friend, the error “Unknown Response” often appears.
That’s all but helpful.
The /who function is completely broken too
By the way, the problem doesn’t only affect the friends list, but also another command – namely /who. This is a command that allows you to see which players are currently in a specific area. For example, you can use “/who Oribos” to see which players are currently in Oribos.
But actually, the command can do much more. With “/who Paladin 60”, you could get a list of which Paladins at level 60 are currently online in your realm. That would be useful, for instance, to directly contact a potential tank or healer.
Also for role players, it is certainly interesting to see what “/who Silbermond” returns if they are in the mood for RP with Blood Elves.
All of that could be accomplished by the /who command.
Could it. If it would work.
Just like the friends list, the /who command has been broken for so long that I have no idea when it last worked properly. It often only shows a fraction of the players who are in a specific location. If the /who command only shows me 3 people in Silbermond, but my friends list has at least 10 people there, and 7 of them are within sight, then I become skeptical.
Especially absurd: I can even humorously type the name of a character into the /who command that is literally one meter away from my character. Even then, WoW confidently tells me “0 players total” – so no players found.
I’m sure my fellow players would wonder if World of Warcraft simply denies their existence while they stand next to me.
Why is all this not working?
I spent a long time trying to make sense of what might have broken these functions. My theory is that it has to do with the multitude of shards, phases, and the war mode. Is that true? No idea.
But honestly: It’s not my job to find the error there.
I think it’s a shame that in an MMORPG some of the most important social functions are not working. World of Warcraft has held up so well over the years also because players have formed relationships, friendships have developed, and you want to team up with good acquaintances again and again.
It should be a top priority that features that promote or even enable social interaction work flawlessly.
If I can’t see in in-game communities, the friends list, and guild list who is currently online, I logically won’t message those players to do something together.
And these features haven’t been broken just since the last patch, but for years. It feels like the errors are becoming even worse and more drastic.
So, Blizzard. It would be really nice if you could gradually get the social functions of World of Warcraft under control again. I mean, why am I even paying 13 euros – um. You know what I mean.
