Started with a fully installed app + starcraft fully installed
I literally played starcraft yesterday. EVERYTHING WAS WORKING YESTERDAY. HOW DID IT BREAK IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS?
Suddenly, starcraft “needs to be updated” for no reason. There apparently was no update. I just wanted to launch the game and play it.
Then the app decides I don’t even have starcraft installed (but I did). Several “Locate install” later and it’s still not working.
Changed regions, fiddled around with launcher settings.
Saw laughable suggestions about driver updates and other bs. Made sure everything was up-to-date, didn’t help.
Restarted, didn’t help
Uninstalled the app…and oh man do I regret that.
Can’t reinstall the app.
Did the clear programdata thing. Did the change regions thing, Cleared the registry keys. Literally every single advanced troubleshooting step you can think of or that has been suggested on reddit or these forums over the past 5 years. Nothing is working.
Sometimes I get the “updating 45%” bug. Sometimes I get network connection issue. Sometimes I simply get some obscure “something broke” message. Fantastic.
Can you imagine if steam had these sort of problems?
So now I have neither starcraft nor a working app.
Blizzard is such a joke now. Goes to show you on a long enough timeline everything good just goes to s*** in the end
I had this issue a week ago and deleting the registry keys for Blizzard plus having the Microsoft Defender off I think did it for me… at least I was through the screen for installation.
But yeah the problem of not being able to play the game came back and reinstalling doesn’t work anymore and I have no real idea what to do. It seems to be an issue with their downloading settings.
Reading the logs produced by their update agent it seems like its trying to connect to the EU version of a battle net agent patch (im in the EU), gives a 404 and then it tries to find the US patch of that battle agent. Then it returns an error 2221, meaning it can’t find some username. My thinking is that their installation setup locates me in the EU, assigns me a EU username and then tries to login into the us server with that and it breaks.
And the hilarious thing after that is that it gets stuck in an infinite loop, it seems their installation agent can’t deal with these errors but instead of stopping it tries to do an install and it ends up calling an POST /install method over and over.
If you’ve been stuck at 45% and let it sit there for a whie, go to the ProgramData folder and look into Battle net/Agent/‘Agent dot something’/Logs, the curl log file can be huge :D.
Anyway long story, thank god Steam works fine.
ps.
maybe if you have VPN, try setting your location to the US; its the one thing i haven’t tried
I was finally able to download and play starcraft. This is what I did
I deleted the blizzard stuff in programdata
I deleted the blizzard regkeys in hkey current user / software / blizzard entertainment
I deleted my install folder for it and the one in programfiles (x86)
I marked battlenet setup to run in compat for win 8 (I think this didn’t help)
I opened task manager, started the install
It got stuck at 45% again
I ended the PROCESS agent.exe, because I noticed the stupid battlenet setup log files say waiting for user input
The install got past 45% and allowed me to install
Some of the times it still didn’t let me install it so I exited setup and tried again
When installing the game, I had to kill agent.exe before I was able to pick an install location for the game
The UI also stopped showing me install progress, but it was actually downloading the game while showing me the default “install now” screen (as if I hadn’t even started the download)
Eventually the game was installed, but unlaunchable from the trash battlenet app
So I went to my starcraft folder, found the starcraft.exe (NOT THE LAUNHCER EXE) in \StarCraft\x86_64\StarCraft.exe
I created a shortcut and added " -launch" to the target
So my target became \StarCraft\x86_64\StarCraft.exe -launch
replace with whatever yours is obviously
Now I can launch starcraft without using the battlenet app. Shame that I have to login within starcraft every time to play multiplayer but at least it works.
I’d just like to add that this sort of hacky solution is ridiculous. Valve does not make me go through this nonsense. Epic does not make me go through this nonsense. Tech support should be forwarding/escalating tickets to their managers and/or filing bug reports for developers to look at, not telling us to go post on the forums for help. The entire support system for this company makes no sense. They have the resources to do better. I’ve paid for things like the relaunch of Diablo 2, so for me to not be able to access that within a few years of paying because they won’t put in the work to fix these problems is very poor form for such a large & [formerly] reputable game company
Wow… well i know what i’ll do in case i see this issue again.
For me the install just worked yesterday, it seems they did some fix for the whole certificate issue that caused the problem. Was able to just install normally and it found my install of starcraft and started immediately. So far everything has been running good.
But yeah this sort of problem is not acceptable at all imo, if i’ve paid for games and I don’t have access to them because of the launcher bugs and issues, well i’ll avoid it as much as possible.
what a joke lol