The folder structure IS changing in 8.1
 

A heads up for those who haven't PTR'd or wondering why it changed.

Thanks, Blu! And Fizzlemizz for the link. :)

Thanks for the heads up.

So the path for addons will be \wow-folder\_retail_\Interface\AddOns\ ?

Wow. This absolutely sucks. I have beta/PTR on a separate drive than WoW. I don’t have the SSD space to install more than just the live version. Looks like I won’t bother with beta/PTR for a long time, if ever. I’m hoping I misunderstood this file reorganization.

That's the way it is with the PTR with the exception of _ptr_ instead of _retail_.

Everything except DATA (Interface, Cache, WTF, Screenshots etc.) is under the _xxx_ folder for each version, otherwise the path structures are the same.

Internally for addons referencing the resources it's still "Interface\\..."

If there is a single DATA folder that holds the majority of the game for all three, then apart from some individual versions of files then it might not be that bad (version sharding). Just a guess on my part. I don't see anything that says seperate installs are "impossible".

I guess there will also be a _classic_ folder in the future.

What about using sym links (I can't remember the proper name).

yup, symlink should work fine

PowerShell:
Example:
fiddle with it if needed.

I had separate folders (on different drives) for retail, ptr, and beta. Both retail and ptr folders have updated to the new folder structure.

_retail_ is 3.18GB, _ptr_ is 144MB, Data in the folder with _retail_ is 71.0GB, and Data in the folder with _ptr_ is 68.4GB.

Do you agree that all I'd have to do to consolidate is move the contents of _ptr_ to the same folder as _retail_ and both versions will work?

(_retail_ is bigger because I've done a ExportInterfaceFiles code (and art))

Hey, I was really looking forward to saving disk space by having _ptr_ and _retail_ in the same “World of Warcraft” folder sharing the “Data” folder. However, even though I now have “Games\World of Warcraft\_retail_”, the PTR is still located at its own “Games\World of Warcraft Public Test\_ptr_”, and it won’t let me install it in a folder that is not called "World of Warcraft Public Test".

I think that is planned for 8.1.5 if I'm not mistaken. They wanted to do it in 2 steps.

All right, thanks. That would explain it. Did you get this from somewhere "official"?

Go to the original link and scroll down to Blu's last post. "Not until they update the installers or the BDA..."

Probably as official as it will get.

Installing the PTR in the same directory as the RETAIL version works as of now!
Only ~3 GB of excess memory are required for the PTR. Nice!!

Can you share the steps you took to get this done? Is it as easy as moving the _ptr_ directory and changing some shortcuts?

Uninstall PTR (from the options in the launcher), re-install PTR.

By the way, the same technique does not seem to work with beta.

As far as I'm aware, beta didn't moved under the general game folder for the lead up to BfA (it's still at 8.0.1.xxx). It probably will for the next xpac., presumably classic as well when it arrives.