All right, I just tested it on 2.1.34 and can confirm the behaviour you’re describing.
The asterisk is not treated as a wildcard in “no-colon” searches anymore, it is matched literally. This was probably introduced with 2.1.24 where there were some changes to the search code. Since this isn’t reflected in the docs, I guess it’s a bug, @dae?
By the way, I’m just on 2.1.22 for an add-on. There are no other reasons to downgrade in my opinion. In your case, you can still achieve the intended search behaviour with *:virtu*likone. This is certainly less effort than downgrading. 