Patch Day Blues

Patch day is just about upon us, so I thought it would be the ideal time to write a little overview of how to make a smooth transition with your addons into the new patch without having to worry too much about the game being playable.

Firstly, let’s deal with a couple of common misconceptions. The TOC version number means very little. WoW tries to match this number with that of its own current interface version number, and if the two aren’t equal, reports that the addon is out of date and refuses to load it — thus the actual functionality of the addon is not even evaluated. Some people wrote software to deal with this issue by going through your addons and updating the version number, however this is considered bad practice and is wholly unnecessary. You can get around it by simply checking the “Load out of date Addons” box under your Addons menu on the character select screen. Et voilà, the majority of your addons are probably working just fine now, without updating them.

This leads me to my next point. Many addons simply don’t need to be updated if they already work fine. I’ve been using some since 2.x without any issue whatsoever! The hell of a new major patch usually only holds true for those who don’t know about the “load out of date” checkbox. That said, there are cases in which addons will just break. These may slightly change functionality or completely destroy the addon as a whole.

My suggestion to anyone reading this and waiting for their server to pop back up is to go through their addon list and look for updates. Contradictory? A little, but updated addons usually mean updated feature sets and potentially performance improvements. If there’s no reason for you not to grab an updated version, then go ahead. Of course, if you’ve made changes to the code of an addon, you’ll definitely want to hold back on doing this.

Before updating any addons, I strongly recommend making a full backup. This means grabbing the existing following directories and copying them to another folder or archiving them in some other way (zip, tar, etc.):

Interface
WTF
Fonts


This will save not only all of your addons, but also any graphical modifications — such as tooltip border changes — settings and fonts. I would recommend doing this whenever you’re going to be doing some major updating or interface lifting.

If an addon hasn’t been updated in quite some time, there’s a better chance that it might need one on patch day. If you’re shopping around to update your addons anyway, you may as well start from the oldest. To get a quick idea of the last time you updated an addon, open up your file manager and sort by the “modified” tab.

Finally, be sure to update addons like DBM and BigWigs. I usually opt for alpha versions for some time straight after a patch as I feel there’s more chance of having current encounter details, which is far more vital to me than a couple of bugs.

And so ends this short overview. Good luck!