When WoW Dies: Starting Over

No, I’m not speaking apocalyptically of the end of the game, when Blizzard shuts off the servers for good.  I don’t see any indications of that happening anytime in the near future.  I’m talking about when your copy of the game ceases to function.  One of the truly great things about the Windows and Mac versions of World of Warcraft is that the game is completely self-contained.  There are no “hidden” files or registry entries.  You can just copy the folder and be done.  This is a good thing because it makes backups really easy and makes moving it from computer to computer really easy.  It’s a bad thing because up until the other day, I’d been using the same installation for more than a couple of years.  Eventually something is going to get corrupted or break, and sure enough it did.  I did a Command-Option-Q to quickly get out of the game a couple of days ago and went to get a drink.  When I came back, the game still hadn’t exited.  I executed a “Force Quit” and restarted it, but it wouldn’t restart no matter what I did.  I deleted all the folders that they tell you to delete when you have problems.  It still wouldn’t restart, so I decided to do a complete re-install from scratch.

My first thought was “Oh my god, I bet I don’t have all my discs”, and sure enough I didn’t.  At least not at first.  I pulled the tin off the shelf that I knew had “most” of the Warcraft installation discs in it, but sure enough the Lich King disc was missing.  (I found it later on.)   Before I found it though, I remembered that you can download the game client from the Account Management page on the World of Warcraft main site.  I decided to give this a whirl.  I have 10 Mbit cable.  How long could it possibly take? It was my hope that maybe by taking this route that I could avoid the vast majority of the patching with the Blizzard Downloader that I would have to suffer through if I went the disc route.  I was wrong. The downloading part of the process took roughly two hours by my estimation.  That’s not “Blizzard Downloader” downloading.  That’s normal, full-speed, non-peer-to-peer downloading.  The peer-to-peer crap came later and probably added at least another forty-five minutes to an hour to the total time.  It would have been much faster with the discs.  The online downloader didn’t give bring me any closer to “up-to-date” than the discs would have. Now you know.

I was immediately faced with another issue.  What addons to re-install.  I pondered reaching into Time Machine and pulling all my old addons back, but I wasn’t sure if maybe one of the addons had caused the problem.  (In hindsight that’s pretty unlikely because the game wouldn’t even get to the login screen, long before it gets to the point where it even loads addons.)

Just like last time when I decided to “start over” with addons, I wanted to take a minimalist approach.  I’m only running a Mac Mini with a gig of RAM, so the fewer addons I use, the better the game will run.  (If somebody wants to buy the 24″ iMac with 4 gigs of RAM and the 8800 GS, I will gladly list you on the sidebar as a blog sponsor!)

That bit of shameless advertising aside…

What addons to re-install was a bit of a dilemma.  My biggest concern was that I haven’t seen a lot of Ace2 updates (on Curse or anywhere else) since the demise of files.wowace.com.  I e-mailed a “blogger-in-the-know” who is a great friend of mine and asked if she had heard anything about the fate of Ace2 and it’s related addons.  Her response, while not conclusive, was that “the last time I talked to him (ckknight) he was coding Warhammer stuff”.  So now we know why there hasn’t been a Cartographer update since the middle of last year.

That’s a big pile of addon software that — for all intents and purposes — is pretty much abandoned at this point.  I’m not saying he won’t update it if it breaks.  I’m saying his attention and affections are somewhere else at this point and if you want regular updates and innovation, Ace2 probably isn’t where you want to look.  It’s a shame.

So there goes about 70% of my addons I wont bother to re-install.

So what did I install immediately?  What can I not live without?

AnnoyingBuffReminder – Nobody knows about it, but it’s a great piece of code.  I’ve reviewed it before and I’ve become dependent on it.  You will never forget to re-cast a buff when it drops ever again.  Ever played a protection paladin and thought “Hey, why can’t I hold agro anymore?”  It will never happen again.

Auctionator – Auctioneer drives me to drink.  Auctionator (which I’ve also reviewed) gets the job done and doesn’t suck down a huge amount of memory.  It’s like Auctioneer was before it started taking steroids.

Doublewide And Lightheaded And TomTom - They go together, and they’re everything you need to power through quests quickly.  Sure you can use them separately but why would you want to?  QuestHelper is just too much of a resource hog.

FloTotemBar – Yup, I’m pretty sure I’ve reviewed this one too.  This is my “essential” shaman addon, and does nice things for Hunters too.  All your totems where you can reach them even if you don’t have them on an action button.  Yum.  (I’m sorry for sending you to Curse on this one, but I didn’t have a choice.  If you wanted to donate a course in basic web design to them instead of getting me the 24″ iMac, I’d understand.)

Outfitter – Outfitter does so many cool things, but the reason I had to have to back was because I am too lazy to equip my riding crop when I get on my mount, and Outfitter will swap it in and out as needed.  This and the ability to strip naked with a single keypress is worth the price of admission.

Sellfish + Vendorbait – Yup.  Another combo I can’t live without.  When none of the crap the quest NPC offers you is useful, it’s just so nice to know which one will get you the most $$$$ at the vendor.

ShowTargetClass – What a wonderful piece of code for those of us who don’t have custom unit frames.  All it does is add the class of the targetted player above their portrait.  Freakin’ awesome, useful, and hardly uses any memory.  Awesome!

Tbag – This one should have four stars beside it.  It’s another “one bag” addon, but I just absolutely love it for being very minimalist.  Once you use it for a week, you’ll be able to find virtually anything as soon as you open your bags, just because the screen locations will become so intuitive.

I’m still looking for a good map addon to replace Cartographer.  It was generating a lot of errors even before it died.  There doesn’t appear to be a huge number of great map addons out there.  What do you suggest?