Meanwhile in German WoW Classic…

After the latest patch, I logged on and got very annoyed as without a warning, all addons had been reset. Why was that? As much as I love using addons, I really don’t like fiddling with the addon settings until they’re all usable. And I really did not feel like doing that yesterday evening. So, off I went to the forums to see if I could at least find an explanation why Blizzard added a patch that broke all addons without warning us beforehand. I could have taken screenshots of the settings, for example.

I didn’t find anybody complaining about the addons, but I did find several people complaining that their server got renamed to a German version (e. g., Heartbreaker to Herzensbrecher). I am not sure if the same had happened to the other non-English European realms. After reading through one of these threads, it dawned on me… I am playing on the German realm Lakeshire – then renamed to Seenhain. And if the realm got renamed, then that was the explanation why my addons weren’t working! I made a copy of my Lakeshire folder and renamed the new one to “Seenhain”. Only that… nothing had happened. All my addons were still in their default state. Apparently, something within the individual addons and within the folder “SavedVariables” requires the server name, so a simple rename of the folder itself wasn’t enough. Thankfully, others had already posted instructions on how to do that using Notepad++. So, finally, my addons were working again and I didn’t have to change any settings manually.

I still didn’t like the German realm names. If they want to do it, fine! But the retail realms had never gotten German names, so why did Blizzard do that to the classic realms now? One blue person posted that they actually weren’t sure whether this was intended or a bug and they asked us to keep reporting (why? One would think that if it is a bug, having a blue one forward that to the higher ups to check should be enough… but apparently, we have to report in mass to be heard).

And today, all realm names got changed back to their English names (no word from Blizzard about that, by the way). I had kept the original realm folder and only had to do the process with Notepad++ and the “SavedVariables” folder to get everything working again for me. But I do feel sorry for the ones who manually changed all their settings yesterday. Hopefully, they at least kept the old addons folder, so they won’t have to do it all over again today (and if they do, there’s an instruction on how to do it here).

But really, how can this happen? Like an “Oops, we didn’t know this would happen!”. Somebody had to get the “go” and come up with the German translation and put that into the patch… oh well. Hopefully, it’ll stay the way it is now, with the good old English names. A little bit of communication from Blizzard would also be nice, though.