So I do not own Shadowlands. But right now my Retail version is downloading 2.33 gigs of update. Why? Do I simply need to uninstall it? Or can you simply stop doing this???
Also if I unsubscribe to the tshirt spam, will i still get informative updates?
All players use the same client regardless of expansions purchased. There would not be a way to stop those updates as all retail players need to have the same version in order to login.
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Everyone is playing on the exact same game client version, so everyone is downloading the updates they push.
Having or not having Shadowlands on your account simply determines whether or not you can access the content, but the content is still there.
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If you don’t wish to download any updates for the game I suppose you would need to uninstall. As the others mentioned, the client is the same regardless of the account level you may have. So no, we’d not be able to stop doing that because you’ll continue to need those updates if you continue to play the game.
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The client updates contain more than Shadowlands areas. Any game mechanic changes, or balancing, or a ton of other things are in there as well.
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Like the others have said, we all play the same game. All the same updates and everything. Buying the expansion just unlocks it.
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Explaining this a different way…
The retail client includes everything in game thru Shadowlands. If you didn’t purchase Shadowlands, you’re merely prevented from accessing the Shadowlands specific content.
Whenever a patch or update is pushed, it literally affects the entire retail client, not just a specific expansion. As such, everyone gets the same download requirement. If you don’t update the game, it won’t let you in game because it’s no longer compatible.
In a nutshell, WoW is continually changing. It is not backwards compatible. A perfect example of this is how Classic must run on it’s own server as will TBC once its released. Even on those servers, as patches or updates are pushed the game is forever changed.
The Battlenet client is the only thing you don’t have to update because you don’t actually need to run it in order to run the game itself. The only caveat to that, is that the Battlenet client is the only way to update the game, so eventually you do have to update the Battlenet client in order to update the game.
So in a nutshell, every time the game is updated, it affects the entire game. This is why a bug fix for something in Shadowlands can potentially cause bugs in earlier levels of the game. They are all intertwined and inseparable.
Just the way it is.
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