Guide CBT Client to Retail for Blade & Soul

1) Move your NCSOFT Folder to another area, like your Desktop.

2) Delete NCWEST Folder.

3) Download the new client from here http://download.bladeandsoul.com/BnS_Lite_Installer.exe and install.

4) When it starts downloading, close the installer.

5) Copy the CookedPC folder from old client (NCSOFT\BnS CBT\contents\bns\CookedPC) to the new installer folder.

6) Run Blade and soul again and it will download the rest of the missing files.

And before someone posts shit, the client checks the md5 hash of each file, if a single thing is changed it will be re-downloaded and will be 100% the same as retail client.

7) Delete ~500MB worth of CBT files which were depreciated, and no longer exist in the Release Build

The reason you need to do this, is because the launcher only checks for files which should exist, it doesn't remove extra files from CBT which should no longer exist. If you skip this step, you'll end up with a folder ~500MB larger than it should be. Since the BnS Client auto-loads certain file types indiscriminately without checking if they should exist, by not removing the extra files you could potentially run into conflicts, corruption issues, or other unexpected bugs down the line.

This should be the full list of files which need to be removed if they exist: http://pastebin.com/wHskDVUd

Where did you get this information?

You'll need to be a bit more specific about which information you are asking about.

The only way NCWest officially supports installing the release client is by doing a fresh install. If you do a fresh install with all languages enabled, you end up with a 24.1GB install folder. This is still the recommended method if you aren't time or bandwidth constrained.

If you go the unofficial route and force a repair from the CBT to Release, you'll end up with a ~24.6GB folder, give or take a little depending on which Alpha/CBT phase you first installed from. If you then try to do a repair, it will still only scan the 24.1GB worth of files (based on FileInfoMap download from the patch server) which should be present from the release client. In my case this meant there was an extra ~500MB with of depreciated CBT files scattered around which shouldn't be there.

I generated the list of files removed from CBT->Release by doing a diff of FileInfoMap from Alpha/CBT against FileInfoMap in the Release build, which I then checked against a clean install of the Release client to verify those files were indeed no longer present.

I know that the client loads files indiscriminately from past experience with modding and such. Most of these upk files which were removed, had their contents moved to other upk files and updated. Depending on what exactly was changed, this leaves the possibility of conflicts or other problems when the Client loads both at start-up.

BnS JP ran into almost this exact problem awhile back, when hundreds of deprecated files remained after a major patch and started triggering graphic corruption. The solution in that case was to either delete the files which should no longer exist, or otherwise be forced to download the client from scratch and do a fresh install in order to resolve the issue. So if you were wondering why NCWest doesn't officially support upgrading CBT->Release, this is likely part of the reason why, and hence caution is required.

I'm providing the list of CBT files removed in the Release client, solely for the sake of people unable to do a clean install. While you could ignore my advice and maybe everything would end up working just fine, you'd be taking a risk of running into unexpected problems at head-start and beyond by doing so. At some point I'm sure someone will create an automatic cleanup script based on that list to make the entire process easier, but until then, manual cleanup or clean install are your two safest options.