90155-your-addon-settings-and-the-latest-patch

== Content ==
			
Hi everyone,
 
As has been documented, a lot of people eagerly logged in yesterday to play new Strain content and soon realized that some of the saved data and/or settings for their Addons (both Carbine Addons and 3rd-party Addons) were missing. Let me first apologize for that. For some people Addon save data represented hours of work customizing or data collected and losing it is inexcusable. I'm sorry.
 
I want to give a brief explanation of how Addon data is stored, what happened to it, clear up some misconceptions, and let you know how you may be able to recover the data. 
 
How Addon Data is stored:
All user Addon data is stored in folders under the AppData folder on your Windows machine. You can find this folder by opening Explorer and typing "%appdata%\ncsoft\WildStar" in the Address Bar. You will see a folder called "AddonSaveData". If you look in that folder you will also see some folders with weird names. These names correspond to your account name(s) and any Addon data that is stored for your account will be in those folders. If you open that folder, you will see folders for each of your character names. The good news is that we didn't erase any of your Addon data. It's all still there in the old folder.
 
What happened:
Because I didn't want to create folders with your Account name (which is your email address) on computers which may be public, we used a name-mangling algorithm to take details of your account information and create a folder name from it. The first 3 characters are from your email name, but the rest is.... sooooper secret. Anyway, we didn't change the algorithm, but some of the information that was associated with accounts was changed. This caused the folder name to change and a new folder was then created.
 
Why didn't we catch that:
Good question! When I wrote the folder name generating code, I thought I was using account information that would never change, and normally it wouldn't have. I didn't know this information changed. The person(s) responsible for changing that information didn't realize anyone else was using it for anything other than its original intended purpose, so they didn't know the folder name would change. As to why no one noticed that saved data was lost between versions of the game, it's probably because in dev we are creating new characters all the time, so it's not unusual to have a bunch of things change or be reset. Which Addons were loaded didn't change, just the settings associated with those Addons, which are usually stored per character (under Account).
 
Misconceptions:
The one thing that I saw mentioned as a possible culprit for this that I really want to clear up is that this may have been caused by the Apollo API number being incremented in this last patch. That is absolutely NOT the case. What happened here should never happen again. We don't expect that this data change will be necessary again, and if something like it ever does become necessary, we will be able to plan for this and make sure it doesn't cause data to be lost.
 
How to recover your lost Addon data:
If you were able to find the folder with your old Addon data, you can simply copy its contents into the new folder and everything should work fine. MAKE SURE YOU COPY THE CONTENTS OF THE OLDER FOLDER INTO THE NEWER FOLDER, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Unfortunately, if you have made any changes since yesterday, they will be lost if you copy the old data. At this point it might be easier to just reproduce the settings organically. There really isn't a good way to "merge" the data.
 
Again, I apologize for the loss of data and the frustration that this must have caused you, our players. I hope this message helps you understand the problem and allows you to recover any vital information.
 
See you on Nexus, unless you play Dominion, in which case I hope you die die die Exiles 4 Life!!!  
 
Ahem, Bitwise out.
 
 	
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Seems ALL my settings go every time I DC!
 
Not just addon data! But even video settings!	
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			Is this why my chat tabs never save or is that something else?	
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			It's amazing how transparent Carbine is on everything. Lucky for me I was changing to new addons anyway so nothing was really lots that was important. 	
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Because I didn't want to create folders with your Account name (which is your email address)
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Great post explaining the error. And it's easy to fix on the client side too.
 
Oh joy the miracles of software development and its hidden bugs ;)	
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{| class="blockquote"
Seems ALL my settings go every time I DC!
 
Not just addon data! But even video settings!
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{| class="blockquote"
MAKE SURE YOU COPY THE CONTENTS OF THE OLDER FOLDER INTO THE NEWER FOLDER, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
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