This is a major upgrade. However, it is relatively well-tested because many people have accidentally updated to version 6 when the Spigot team updated WorldGuard for 1.8 but did not update v5.9.
The version that you downloaded supports Minecraft 1.7.10 and 1.8.
NEW DOCUMENTATION: There is new work-in-progress documentation. However, refer to the older wiki for missing pages.
When updating to v6, your region data will be updated to use player UUIDs rather than their names. That means that you cannot downgrade to WG 5.9 because it does not understand UUIDs and will remove all ownership data. However, you can use Six2Five to downgrade region data stored as YAML.
Remember to make backups.
If you do not use region protection, then downgrading requires no extra steps.
There have been many changes, but the most important (and breaking ones) are listed below.
The region protection has been optimized and aggressive caching has been added. That means that the impact of region protection when hundreds or thousands of regions exist has been minimized.
build flag to deny will break pistons and Redstone. When you set the build flag to deny, you are essentially saying that no one can build at all. Now that blocks and entities are considered the same as players, they get blocked in that case. What's the solution? First of all, you probably do not want to set the build flag: remember, when you create a region, only members can build in it, so there's no need to change the build flag./rg flag __global__ passthrough deny. Unset the build flag if you had set it to deny. As you may know, when you create a region, protection is automatically turned on (only members can build). If you don't want that, you can set a region's passthrough flag to allow. In the case of the global region, it defaults to allow, so you have to set it to deny to turn that off.use flag to be much more encompassing, but this is no longer the case. The use flag now works like it did before in 5.x, only applying to things like doors, pressure plates, and levers. A new interact flag was added instead that controls all right clicks of blocks and entities.use flag is now set so only members of a region can use levers and doors within a region. If you want to disable this type of protection in all protected regions, use /rg flag __global__ use allow./rg flag spawn pvp -g nonmembers deny./rg flag spawn chest-access deny, only non-members would be unable to open chests. In WG 6, you have to explicitly specify this: /rg flag spawn chest-access -g nonmembers deny.__global__ region or override it in a specific region. In addition, the tone and color of the default message has been softened, but you are free to change it entirely.on-place to water or lava blocks because it will also deny the use of buckets. If you wish to deny the use of just the liquid blocks, use on-use. This is because WorldGuard now considers the use of a bucket also the placement of a liquid block.wg-invincible and wg-amphibious), you now have to enable these features in the config (auto-invincible-group: true and auto-no-drowning-group: true). This is because some permission plugins have been causing severe hang ups whenever it is queried for a player's groups, which, in this case, happens to include when the player joins.Plugins that utilize WorldGuard's API may not work anymore. They may crash with errors. The API has changed somewhat.
settings.global-api-cache, if enabled, will crash WG UUID lookups (fixed in Spigot build #1625)The rest of the changes can be found in the CHANGELOG file.
In addition, there is new work-in-progress documentation that describes some of the new features.