[WoW] Very weird /follow issue

[Lax]

There's a pretty simple explanation for this.

WoW's /follow command is substring only, there is no "exact match" /follow. So when you are ungrouped and you type /follow beeq, each client is going to select what it thinks is the right person to follow based on the substring "beeq" -- which happens to be the first 4 letters of 6 of your 10 guys. It might be distance-based, or it might simply be the first one in the client's list of players that matches the string, I'm not entirely sure, but it is indeed going to appear random as described.

So, why does this not happen when grouped? Well, the ISBoxer Addon overrides /follow. Part of what ISBoxer does is attempt to translate the name into "party1" or "raid1" and so on in order to mitigate this and other issues. So when you're grouped, and you type /follow beeq, it's actually checking if beeq is the name of someone in your party or raid, and setting it up so what you really did was /follow party1 instead of /follow beeq. When your characters are NOT grouped or in a raid, there is no list for ISBoxer to check against and no tricky terms like party1 or raid1 that more accurately identify your toons.

Moral of the story is, in WoW, you want to make sure one of your toon's names isn't the same as the beginning of all of your other guys names.