This topic recently came up because the spouse and I are trying to encourage a friend to start playing WoW. The only problem is, he has an old PC and a Mac that doesn’t work. He’s going to get the Mac fixed, but it might take him awhile, so he wants to know whether he can install his copy on his PC, then when he’s ready to migrate to the Mac, install it there and still retain his character and other information. He doesn’t want to start a character on the PC and then lose it if he has to switch to the Mac.
In the same vein, could I install my copy on my laptop so I can still play when I’m away from home? I’d even be happy to buy another copy if need be–I just need to be assured that I won’t lose or mess up my character info if I have it running on more than one machine.
All character info for World of Warcraft is on the WoW servers. As long as you have a working copy with all the relevant patches, you can play them anywhere.
Athena is correct; you can access your character information from any computer that has WoW installed.
For you, you wouldn’t need to buy a new copy for your laptop - my wife installed the version from my computer onto her laptop, and it works fine even when both of us play at the same time. (For the easily confused, we do actually have seperate accounts; we’re just running off the same install disks.)
The only thing that might be problematic is your friend switching from PC to Mac; while his character information will be on the servers and accessible by both computers, I don’t know whether he’d have to buy a seperate copy because the software itself would be different for a Mac. But that’s a question that depends on his set-up and how he plans to run WoW on that Mac, whether normally or through PC emulation.
Yep, the WoW software doesn’t care which machine, or how many, you load the software onto. You can have multiple people use the same machine, at different times, from different accounts, or you can access the same account from multiple machines. It also doesn’t matter which disks you install from. We have copied the entire WoW subdirectory onto another machine, rather then install and download all the patches.
I would double check the WoW forums, to see if there is any problem switching between the Mac version of the software and the PC version. Unlike some other games, both platforms play on the same game servers, but I don’t know if there are problems.
One thing to watch for. If you have an account that is enable for the new Burning Crusades expansion, but you don’t have the expansion loaded onto the computer you are at, you will not be able to sign in until you install the expansion software onto that machine.
I play on both a PC and a PowerBook. Hybrid CDs are the thing I love best about Blizzard games.
One thing you might have problems with if you play on multiple computers is add-ons. These aren’t server-side, so if you want Auctionner and Titan or whatever you’ll need to download and install them on every computer you want to play on. (The add-ons will work on both platforms.)
The CD Key is also not apparently used beyond installation, and you don’t need the original disks to play. 2 people can play on copies spawned from the same CD at the same time, as long as each has their own account. When you buy the game, you are buying an account, and the software comes extra.
Yeah, basically the CD key is only needed to create your account. You can use your CDs (or DVD if you’re obsessive like me) to install as many times as you want, but to create an account you need to buy a copy of the game. Ditto for the expansion The Burning Crusade – you can install it wherever you choose, but you need a CD key to upgrade your account to access the new content that’s only available to Burning Crusade owners.
If an addon breaks the game, you just turn it off. They can’t break anything except while they’re running.
Your key shortcuts, position of the chat box, etc. are all things that are saved local on the computer you are playing on, so if you switch computers they will be lost. (Though it’s possible that if you copy and paste the WTF folder over onto the Mac that all your settings will carry over just fine. Better to back up the folder on the Mac before trying it though.)
But here’s the burning question: I’m assuming that the settings will be lost on the new machine and I’ll have to re-establish them, but since they’re stored locally it won’t affect the ones on the original machine, right?
I know this is probably a massively dumb question, but better to spell it out ahead of time than to try it and find out that I made an incorrect assumption and lose the carefully set but currently undocumented settings on my old machine. (to be extra careful, I’ll probably write them all down before I do this anyway).
Pasting the folder won’t work (right?) because the old machine is a Mac and the new machine is a PC.
I don’t see why pasting the folder wouldn’t work, I used a hybrid system for years (we had Macs, UNIXes and Windozes) and you could always grab some file from one and pop it into another. So long as you had a program that could read the file, it was fine. In this case you’ll have a program that can read it: WoW.
I dont doubt that you are right here, but that statement tweaked my geeky interests.
Windows uses a FAT32/NTFS type file system and disk formatting. What does a MAC use? Are they so similar to each other that a WoW file (which will be a file with the data arranged in a proprietary way) can just be dragged and dropped?
Mac uses HFS, HFS+, FAT, UFS, and a few others, but it’s irrelevant. The format of the disk has no effect whatsoever on the bytes that make up the file – if it did, you couldn’t copy a file from a FAT32 drive to an NTFS one on Windows, either.
And the most of the WOW configuration files aren’t in a proprietary format: they’re XML - pure text files. Blizzard’s been doing cross-platform stuff for years, I’d be surprised if these files weren’t cross-platform compatible. Most add-ons are, for sure, so I don’t know why the Blizzard-created ones wouldn’t be.
(Note that I’m only talking the configuration files here. Obviously the exectuables are different.)
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