WoW Census+ might be missing people on large servers

[jpates]

I tried using Census+ on a high population server. It had gotten down to the point of it having to search for Level 85, by race, by class, by name. I think it is missing groups of people whose names start with H, J, K, L, M, N, Q, V, W, X, Z if it has to go this deep into the scan.

The chat echo showed the following... (This happened for multiple races and classes when it got down to this level of specificity).

n-y
n-u
n-t
n-s
n-r
n-p
n-o
n-i
n-g
n-f
n-e
n-d
n-c
n-b
n-a

[Pennet]

Those n-? searches you're seeing aren't missing anyone. The n- field is pure pattern matching, so a search for n-s will get anyone with an s anywhere in their name. For instance, I just ran a manual /who mage 85 on my server and got 34 results. Then I ran a /who mage 85 n-s, and it cut the list to 14. My mage was on the first list, but not the second, as I have no s in my name.

The only people that might be getting missed under the current system are people who have non-regular ascii characters combined ONLY with one or more of the "missing letters" that you listed. And frankly, from my point of view, screw those guys for having stupid names.

[1974ER]

This topic is discussed in more detail in slightly older thread:

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4819

You may want to at least skim through it. It's a rather interesting read (and no, I am not saying that just because I posted in that thread too.. ).