I’ve been getting that for the last few hours, wasn’t the case ~12 hours ago, this is new.
But I got it on windows a few times as well, I don’t know what’s happening.
Got some bad news for you; most of the folder sharing methods are broken with newer versions of windows, and blizzard has disabled installations on network locations: imgur[.]com/d2ccNMV
I just spent the last 2 hours trying the same thing.
I was able to install wotlk classic by using a windows vm and installed the battle.net client on it. But instead of an smb network share to install/update the game files i attached a new disk image to the vm. I have then formatted the disk with NTFS and mounted it to E:\ on the guest os.
This way the battle.net client does not complain and i was able to install wotlk classic to this drive.
I shut down the vm, mounted the qcow2 image for this drive as an nbd device (qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 /path/to/image.qcow2) and mounted the device to my lutris wine prefix.
Instead of starting the battle.net client i start the game directly now, which works fine.
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Just writing to add to the list of people impacted. I now primarily game on the Steam Deck, and can no longer play Blizzard games. I have been looking forward to Diablo 4, still am, but the longer this goes on the more hesitant I will be to order it.
I have been fortunate enough that I could use wine 7.17 and turn off e-sync and my launcher will still work (well enough to play). But I am apprehensive about OW2 launching and this problem still being around in a way that prevents me from updating to the new game. I’m looking forward to playing it again after being in the beta, so I hope in the next 12 days there’s a solution found with by the Wine devs or Blizzard will throw us a bone and help out on their end.
It’s kind of funny that in general Blizzard games will work fine with no/minimal Wine tweaking, so the thing that’s most likely to stop us from playing is the launcher for those games.
What a bummer. I’m not having much luck finding a solution that actually works, as of today. My Battle.net is stuck around 65% on “Updating Battle.net”.
As a 10-year Linux veteran I can say that WoW and SC2 have both been quite dependable on the OS. Occasionally Battle.net becomes busted after it was working perfectly fine. Makes you wonder if it was intentional in any way.
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I was getting crashes after around 10 minutes of play since this morning but I was able to “fix” it by changing the agent.exe to an older version. I guess when today’s update came out it replaced that file which broke the entire thing. It’s a bandaid fix you’ll have to reapply everytime the game gets updated but at least it’ll let you play.’
Trying to get games to work on linux basically makes you a computer expert.
is anyone stuck with the battle.net agent went to sleep blah blah after the proposed downgrade on Agent.exe ?
I get that occasionally. If you wait a couple minutes it goes away just fine on its own in my experience. I don’t think it is related to this otger stuff.
Yes. But it goes away. I have seen this for months personally. It jist slows you down a little at first.
+1 Steam Deck user unable to play Overwatch. Blizzard needs to fix the launcher.
Don’t care that they “don’t support Linux.” Most of the games work out of the box via proton. Even if they refuse to support it on a per game basis, at least provide support for the launchers so tech savvy folks can run the games themselves via Proton, Wine, Lutris, etc.
Ignoring this user base is very poor business on Blizzard/Activision’s part. People are talking about cancelling their subscriptions and having to copy their game over from other machines. This is embarrassing for Blizzard.
i been waiting for hours . something is off with that old agent.exe
Ok I lied I couldn’t let it go. On Steam Deck
So I used lutris with esync and fsync disabled on 7.2.2 to install battle.net (the usual, it gets to 100% and back to zero thing). Replaced the Agent.exe and did the chattr +i business to it and made sure the config file had streaming and hardware accel set to “true”. Copied over my PC install again in case the recent attempts borked the one I copied before. Told Bnet where to find the games and it checked em out and finally let me hit Play without being frozen or stuck in a loop and it opened. But I was still in Desktop mode and I wanted it to work in Gaming mode too.
Lutris didn’t want to add the Bnet install as a steam shortcut for whatever reason. Adding the bnet exe as a non-steam game didn’t work for me with any layer and I made the compatdata’s Agent file immutable too and it was still looping. So I made a desktop shortcut to the Lutris Bnet install and added that as a non-steam game. Went back into Gaming mode and it started right up and WoW was playable.
I haven’t explored beyond this point, so I don’t know if it’ll be laggy or something weird after a while. I logged in, jumped on a character to see if it would let me and then popped out because I have to do the consoleport stuff now.
edit:
I have now played around on it in game for a little over an hour with these settings. Just doing old content with no other players around, but no slowdowns, no lag, no weirdness.
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Same issue here. And I don’t think it’s really valid for Blizzard to ignore us Linux folks anymore, with the rise of the Steam Deck and Chromebook models that are actually capable of gaming on the way out (Granted I’m on Fedora Linux, not on either one of those, but the point remains those are also Linux based and are considered pretty mainstream). We do exist, and enjoy the games. And over the past few years I think our OS of choice has become a bit more popular (If only just a bit).
We’re not asking for a Linux native port of anything, but for FOSS sake, please do at least a bit of testing against WINE and/or Proton when pushing out new versions.
Edit: I managed to find a backup of an older version on one of my hard drive and simply placed it inside my wine bottle and told the bottles app to run it. Problem resolved for now. If you [Blizzard] continue to break it I’ll just have to keep rolling back to a previous version 
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at a moment they also developped wow on Linux machines, it’s one of the reason of the OpenGL part.
The main problem with launcher real Linux port it that it relied on Visual Studio 2014 and .net C++ libraries. Also it’s compiled in C++98 (they can improve by upgrading to C++11…)
at a moment they also developped wow on Linux machines
They also probably run the WoW servers on Linux. It’s funny how these game companies actually use it, but then when the customer (player) uses it they seem… I’m going to say less than enthused? 
don’t mismatch developping the server and the client.
Client seems to use protobuf, i’m pretty sure that the server provides some common libraries for the communication based on frameworks around protobuf, but client should be developped by another team, just using the communication lib from the server team, or something like this (common pattern in client/server development, regarding any technology you develop)
Also the launcher should be developped by another team, using only the game storage libraries from a team managing the way that blizzard assets are stored, and this launcher team is certainly a tiny team…
I got the same problem as well. I have tried all the work arounds suggested here on r/linux gaming and r/ steam deck however I can’t get Battle.net or Diablo 3 to run. Which is a damn shame because I really wanted to finish this saeson. 
It would be nice if Blizzard threw us a bone and let us play games.
Would really hope that Bliz would at least acknowledge the issue… whether to say they’re working on it or not planning to. A post with almost 300 comments seems like it would be a good place to say something. Not to be a whiny baby screaming “Im going to drop my sub if it’s not fixed”, but the steam deck is honestly the only platform I can play wow on right now. Essentially paying for a product I may not even be able to use again?
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Also have the issue. Playing with Lutris from 2019 Classic launch without any issues up until this moment. Blizzard, you need to cooperate and communicate with the community.
My workaround for the moment is to update using the old Agent.exe trick and playing through a duplicated entry in Lutris with executable to wow exe.
I got it running and updating with the crazy method below. Note that the OPs solution didn’t work for me, I had to tweak it like I describe in post 4 that my link points to: