Why is the who feature so restricted?

[Slimey]

I don't know if it's like this on the other realms but on Medivh it seems like the who feature is time restricted. It may not be a big deal for some players but I personally find it a bit annoying... I mean I want to see who's leveling in my zone, and what level/class someone is by shift-clicking their whispered name. I use Who a lot so i'm just curious to why it's like this

[grobain161]

Let's just say it's realm performance related and leave it at that.
Letting players query the server's player list getting info about each of them would cause a large performance impact.

Adding filters to the query could allow better performance thus allowing more frequent filtered queries, but won't necessarily cause who knows how warmane keeps the list sorted (if it's sorted at all) and going through 12k of anything takes a bit of time.

[Slimey]

Let's just say it's realm performance related and leave it at that.
Letting players query the server's player list getting info about each of them would cause a large performance impact.

Adding filters to the query could allow better performance thus allowing more frequent filtered queries, but won't necessarily cause who knows how warmane keeps the list sorted (if it's sorted at all) and going through 12k of anything takes a bit of time.

I mean I kind of understand how realm performance could be a factor, but other private servers with lots of players have the Who feature working no problem, also with no server stability issues. I know this is about Warmane and not any other private server, but it really should be no difference - especially given Warmane's superb quality.

[Agramon]

That's why we have the best server performance out of all larger private servers. We if didn't have restrictions for some functions like /who , we could be easily DDoS'ed by simple in-game function when used by a bunch of people at the same time.

[Slimey]

That's why we have the best server performance out of all larger private servers. We if didn't have restrictions for some functions like /who , we could be easily DDoS'ed by simple in-game function when used by a bunch of people at the same time.

See I don't understand that because if you can technically DDoS a server or atleast strain the server from everyone simply using /who at the same time, people would/could be doing that on other large private servers too like Elysium, which no one has done, or have they hmm... I just don't think blocking /who is logical. If someone intends to DDoS the server I would think they'd do it through stronger measures. Honestly I think you guys should experiment through a stress-test with /who on no restriction.

[Peregrine]

Basically they can query server thousand times in sec/returning mass influx of data back n forth thus straining server to crash point.

[Slimey]

Basically they can query server thousand times in sec/returning mass influx of data back n forth thus straining server to crash point.

I don't believe /who being used regularly on a high population server could cause a server crash let alone strain. Just like any other large private server, /who being used normally has and should indefinitely not impact the server stability what so ever - especially with good hardware. Now if people are actually purposely trying to sabotage the server with /who then I think eventually strain can be possible, but even then I don't believe /who has as much umpth as you suggest.

[IcarNS]

As far as I understand this, when someone types /who the server lists all the players and filters them, right? Then, why not have a dedicated little hardware where every X time refreshes the list of /who and, when a user in-game does a /who, the list is filtered and returned from the dedicated one? This way the command has no impact on the realm, and filtering from a cached list that updates, even of from the same server, is way more optimized than listing the 12.000 players every request.

[HaixzElder]

As far as I understand this, when someone types /who the server lists all the players and filters them, right? Then, why not have a dedicated little hardware where every X time refreshes the list of /who and, when a user in-game does a /who, the list is filtered and returned from the dedicated one? This way the command has no impact on the realm, and filtering from a cached list that updates, even of from the same server, is way more optimized than listing the 12.000 players every request.

You want an extra machine just for /who funcion?

For the guy that keeps asking about the /who function, imagine 1 guy asks you to spell the alphabet. No problem right?
then 2 guys ask you to do it, yo do it twice.
Imagine 400 persons asking for alphabet at the same time only from you, its kinda the same for the server if a lot of people spam the /who fucntion you will cause server lags as it retrieves the same info about thousands of players multiple times at the same time

[atbatb]

I think they should lower the /who cooldown to 5 sec. Then after doing /who like 5 times within 30 seconds, increase the /who cooldown to the current (I think) 1 minute. After this minute the /who cooldown resets to the 5 seconds again.
Like this, it would mitigate the ddos effect that /who might have while not restricting players who use /who too much.
It would also still prevent those population scan addons from accurately depicting a server's population.

[Jhenna0]

Why does it have to be 1 minute?
If you lowered it to 59 seconds, would the server crash?