I’ve had a few problems with the Mac client this week. One of them was nearly fatal. I want to make this blog post in the hopes of helping other people who may be faced with the same situation(s) and not know how to handle it.
The Downloader
(This actually applies to Windows too, I think.) Have you noticed all the talk about Patch 3.1? Were you like me and wondering what all the commotion was about 3.1 pre-downloading and wondering when it was going to start for you? I was sure confused. None of that stuff ever pre-downloads for me, and yesterday I found out why. There are two executables in your World of Warcraft folder. One is called “World of Warcraft” and one is called “World Of Warcraft Launcher”. While dragging “World Of Warcraft” to your dock will work (and bypass the stupid news screen) it won’t launch the Blizzard Downloader when you’re done so that it pre-downloads the bulk of the 3.1 patch. You know… the news screen isn’t that annoying. You might just want to switch the icon on your dock.
File Corruption
I don’t know about you, but I’ve found the Mac client to be a lot more fragile than the Windows client. It seems to be easier for files to get corrupted resulting in the game refusing to load. I’ve now had this problem twice in two to three months. Re-installing from scratch is no fun and there are a couple of things you can do to minimize the pain.
- Make a backup, independant of Time Machine. It’s best to do this when you have just done a clean install, but you can do it anytime you have a “working” copy of WoW. It’s so easy to do on a Mac. If you have an external hard drive, just drag your whole WoW folder to the external drive so you have a backup copy if anything goes south. You should do this independantly of Time Machine so you have a second tier of protection. Do not depend on Time Machine by itself. Hard drives and USB enclosures are cheap and one of the best investments you can make. If you don’t have an external drive, please take the time to backup your WoW installation to series of DVD’s. It is much faster to restore the files uncompressed from backup DVD’s than it is to install them from the installation DVD’s and then have to apply all the patches.
- Use Time Machine as well. Time Machine saved my bacon this week. When things went south on Sunday, I restored the WTF folder from Friday. It took about fifteen minutes. That’s a lot faster than doing a complete re-install.
Mmmm, strange about the corrupted files, I have been playing on a Mac for the past two years and (fingers crossed) has never happened to me. I agree with backing up the whole WoW folder though, you are never too safe
Azande:
The first time it happened (about 2-3 months ago) I did a Option-Command-Q to exit the game, and when I came back from the kitchen it was pinwheeling, and I had to do a Force Quit.
The other day, I tried to change my sound device and the exact same thing happened.
The first time I tried to do a Time Machine restore and it failed and I got p’ed off and just did a complete re-install. The second time I was more persistant and managed to survive with only a restore of the WTF folder.
*shrug*