The Video Game Revue

How To Fix World of Warcraft Config on Mac OS X

I just ran into a little trouble with World of Warcraft on Mac OS X. Sunny and I have separate user accounts, but mine has admin privileges and hers doesn't. (Actually, I'd feel better if neither account was an "admin" and there was a separate root account entirely.) What Sunny found was that WoW wasn't saving her Interface Options configuration, such that if she enabled Auto Loot, for example, it would be turned off again the next time she started WoW.

Finding information about this issue on the web was difficult. There are more articles out there discussing how to run WoW on Ubuntu than talking about Mac OS X issues. I even managed to find a thread where some Windows Vista users were having the same issue while running WoW with a non-admin user.

It didn't take much digging around to figure out where WoW writes it's config files in Mac OS X:

/Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

There's a simple Terminal command that you can use to make all of the files in this directory write-able for all users:

chmod -R a+w /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/WTF/

Having made this change, I now find that Sunny's user can save config data. She's still not able to install patches, though, but I won't try to tackle that issue here.

posted by Parappa @ 9:41 PM