This part of the Gold Rush Plan for Cataclysm gold is really important for everyone planning to get in early when servers go live with Cataclysm on December 7th. If you haven’t preloaded Cataclysm before launch day you’re going to run into a lot of grief; due to the excessive load it could literally take *hours* to get Cataclysm downloaded and running, wasting precious time if you’re trying to take advantage of the Gold Rush.
The basic steps for forcing the preload are:
- Shut down WoW game app, launcher, background downloader
- Edit 2 files in your “World of Warcraft/WTF/” installation folder
IMPORTANT: Use a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit
- Edit Launcher.wtf: Change the “accountType” line from LK to CT
- Edit Config.wtf: Change the “accountType” line from LK to CT
- Run the Launcher app… background downloading will begin (800 MB)
I do a walk-through in the video showing you just how easy it is.
Special thanks to Toltec from the MGB Forums for pointing out how to do this. Toltec’s Post
It’s worth mentioning that if you haven’t pre-purchased cata, after making the changes and launching the game a second time, the settings default back to “:LK”. So you need to edit the files before every launch.
These changes were already made on my system. I’m assuming it’s due to me pre-buying the Cataclysm expansion through Battle.Net or a recent update. Thanks for the info though!