WHO + Letter Search Only
More realistic data

So hypothetically: Make 'who + letter' the only syntax for 'who', so only letter searches can be made.

It would basically be an anti-feature and make it harder to check who is on the network, and I understand if everyone would hate it. But I think it could have a few advantages in terms of reducing small-worlding and making it much more difficult to suss out if a character is awake at particular times, or whether groups of characters are all awake together or not, or to get tipped off that some super dangerous/famous character is active.

Also ctags are pretty much the strongest advertising that exists in-game, since they're constantly seen over and over for free, and not being able to rely on slapping the job in the tag and having every PC know, might drive more SICAD or business card use.

It could even be something cyberneticists could enable, a dangerous debug mode that allows characters to mainline all the data there is, even if it blows out their synapses on the pavement.

Maybe WHOLIST is now too much of a fundamental roleplaying tool to muck around with it, but fog is an effective tool at making things seem bigger than they are.

From a character point of view I see it more as Microsoft teams user list for work, or discord who's online list. With the tech available at the time, it should not be surprising that the system could filter out notable contacts, relatable contacts, personalised contacts out of the millions of Sic users to give you just a small section of those relevent to you.

As for the potential player advantages, we all have access to use it both IC and OOC how we wish, there are things in game to mess with SIC which I think provide enough tools to counter the potential meta game. But honestly, I think there is a lot to be said for SIC as a tool for characters IC especially SEC, WJF and so on.

I like its current state honestly.

Has anyone actually tried typing 'who w' for example? I implemented this years ago.

I'm against this. I always rationalize it as you are getting a sunset of users based on the sic machine learning algos showing you aliases it thinks you will be interested in.

Plenty of folx use sic to advertise services and in a game our size the benefits of being able to see who is available to interact with outweigh the unrealism of it.