Re: /who Command not working?
I don't think it is intentional. I think that recent optimizations broke it. But if it is intentional, then it most likely is, as i have sayed above, to not "hide" population, but to reduce number of usages of /who command and resulting server load decrease.
You must realise that such queries increase server load exponentialy. If it takes 0,01% of server power to do query for 500 players, then it is 0.1% for 1000, 0,5% for 2000, 1% for 3000, 5% for 4000, etc.. I of course don't know exact numbers, but you must realise that /who is realy recource demanding with high population. And census addon is the worst one because it makes shit loads of queries in short amount of time.
Basicaly, if 1000 of 5000 players use census addon, then they take server resource that may handle another 1000 players efectively reducing number of possible online players without high latency.
I may be wrong, but i doubt it.
Hmm, when I used /who in SW (z-"Stormwind City" 57-63), i got all people in stormwind (23 players), but when i used it on higher range, it showed me random people. It realy seems that there is an bug atm.