In a recent thread where a Blue announced changes to the UI (I’ll link it at the bottom of this post), one player revealed that sound replacement mods no longer function on the PTR. I copied my own sound mods over to the PTR and confirmed this to be the case.
For those that don’t know, sound mods are not against the TOS because they do not modify or replace game files, rather they are placed into a separate ‘Sounds’ folder and override the default sounds which still exist unaltered within the games files. This is built-in functionality that was confirmed as being allowed in this 2010 Blue post.
I just wanted to bring this up somewhere that will get more attention, there are many people who use sound addons for a variety of reasons, from silencing sounds they find annoying to restoring things that were removed like the Vanilla gun sounds, and everyone who does is going to be very disappointed when 8.2 goes live.
This is about the 8.2 patch, there’s a whole other board dedicated to 8.2, this is GD, this is where dumb people express the complaints that should be shoved down the toilet.
The 8.2 boards are for development and testing issues. This post could go in either because at this point, this thing is going live as is. Like I said, its a warning to the general populace. Not my fault you can’t read.
This is an unfortunate consequence of the data mining arms race IMHO.
Coming in 8.2 they are getting rid of 99% of the filenames. This is why sound file mods are going to break. Sound file mods work as they override existing file paths making your custom sound play instead (or play silence in the case of silence mods) . If there’s no names the code that would normally override an exisiting sound in favour of your custom sound never works as it literally can’t find the sound you want to replace.
Unfortunately Sound file mods seem to be the only non Addon related mod particularly affected by this. Cursor type over-rides haven’t be possible for years now (afaik) . Custom fonts aren’t affected by this change either (afaik).
I never used sound mods anyways cause what’s the point? i play the game with the sounds off like 95% of the time these days cause of the annoying game sounds despite turning off the sound effects. But i’m glad this is bought to attention.
Personally i just wish WoW just have an Offline Single-Player game option already so we can mod the crap out of it how we want.
Certain creatures (some hunter pets, the priest banshee follower) can be horrifically annoying, so replacing their sound with silence can be a huge quality of life improvement.
What has me most upset is that it breaks bobber replacement sounds for fishing. At this point, the normal splashing sound is super easy for me to miss. Worse, I dual box, including manually dual-boxing fishing (makes fishing much more interesting since there’s less waiting to react to something).
I used to have different bobber sounds for the left PC and the right PC (they play through the same speakers). Now, I can’t tell which bobber went off if I blink or glance away at the wrong moment.
[INB4 trolls go “multiboxers should all die, so I’m glad!” I don’t dual-box group content where it would inconvenience people. Other than strobe following, auto mount (when leader mounts), and a basic assist macro, I fully manually play both toons using two PCs and two keyboards.
I don’t dual-box PvP/War Mode and gank people (I’m a faction pacifist). I don’t subject people to my dual-boxing in IEs or dungeons or LFR/Raids. I just PvE level, quest and solo old content for pets/mounts/xmog/toys.]
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