Since the classical team decided to work on the game, I thought I’d give them a hand in tracking down the perpetual update bug. Where you update the game, open it and play a game, then close it and you need to update it yet again.
I figured that most likely some of the game files change after you play a game for some reason, so I ran some powershell scrips.
I cached all of the game files’ hash codes right after updating the game.
Then I cached all of them again after playing a game and closing HotS.
And I compared the differences between the hash codes (Using SHA256) of all of the files.
There were 2 differences:
…\HeroesData\data\data.013
…\HeroesData\data\shmem
Those are binary files, and seeing what precisely changes in them would be difficult. At least for me. But I thought I could at least give the classical team a direction where to search for the problem.
The shmem is more likely some temporary file and is less likely to be the cause. I deleted it and opened the game again, and it recreated itself. So the devs should look up what is changing data.013 and why.
UPDATE:
I played another game and stored the hash code of the files again. data.013 seems to have the same code as last time. So I suppose that the devs can just make that version of the file the “desired” one, and the launcher will no longer think it needs an update after every time you play the game.
UPDATE 2:
The plot thickens. I updated the game again and checked for changes. Weirdly enough, this time data.013 was the same. There were differences in the shmem, as well as the …\HeroesData\hero\0c0…5.idx and the shmem file in that directory as well.
I played more games and then there was a difference only in the data\shmem. So maybe the shmem file IS the problem?
UPDATE 3:
Bad news, everyone. I updated the game again. This time there were differences in 0c00…06.idx and the shmem files.
I created a backup of the data/shmem. Played a game and the only difference was in the shmem file. So I restored the backup. But the game still thinks it’s in need of an update. So the problem isn’t in the game files.
One needs to have an access to the launcher’s “update finding” logic. And inspect what’s going on with HotS in order to determine how to fix this bug
Mine just loads without the update bug for the first time in years
If we can get the bug back that’d be nice, doesn’t feel right to work like a normal game
The ‘update bug’ refers to more than one event that forumites have conflated to just being one thing, especially if they aren’t active in the bug/technical support topics.
Back in March of 2022, the support staff concluded that the HotS-side of an ‘update bug’ was fixed and closed topics about the matter.
Other similar-looking ‘update bugs’ have been concluded to be based on the battle.net launcher, so the offered solutions have been to check file permissions, bypass using the launcher for playing HotS, or follow these steps.
Outside of those 3 differences in the ‘update bug’, support suggest the issue may be individually-based:
In this case, I’d recommend going through the rest of the steps here to rule out other common causes. If this persists then create a support ticket with your MSinfo so we can investigate what is causing a problem for you specifically.
Since the original bug has been resolved I am going to close this thread. If anyone has any similar installation problems in the future, please create a new thread or create a support ticket.
Thanks you for your dedication about that problem.
Another guy pointed out, on another post, that the issue seemed to come from games running on another version than the english one (text and voice). I don’t know if it’s true but i don’t play on that version. If you people are playing on the english version, can you confirm that you may not have that issue ?
Likewise, I’ve also followed all the directions offered by Tech Support, and the bug persists. I know it’s not just me, as not a single person on my friends list doesn’t have this issue either, and many are far more tech savvy than I am, and they can’t resolve the issue.
I hate to see so many people rage about this issue, so i’ll share the work around. In the launcher, click “Automatic Update” and the game updates the second it shuts down and takes approx 1 second. Just consider it 1 extra second of game shutdown time.
I can’t speak for other people posting about it in this thread, but I’m hardly raging about this issue.
Thank you for the advice, but I already have the client set to auto update, and it takes far more than a second to update.
Also, this bug looks bad to any new players to the game. If the recent patches and skins indicate a possibility of a revival, a persistent bug like this one should be resolved, as it’s a bad look.
I am not raging. But I can’t fathom how hasn’t anyone fixed it for years now.
I have a masters degree in computer science and thus I know that memory has a limited read/write cycles (the write ones are more damaging). So when you’re meaninglessly updating some file/s every day (maybe several times a day?), you are shortening your the lifetime of your computer memory.
Sure, it may be something minuscule in this case, but it’s still annoying.
So instead of auto-update, I’m just running the game through the Switcher. But then I need to manually log in every time I open the game, which is also annoying.
You can’t tell me that a company like Blizzard is incompetent and can’t fix one bug… It wasn’t always there. They could try to see when it appeared and see what changes were made then (be it to the game or the launcher), and try to figure out what started causing it.
Since launching the executable is not at all inhibited by the update but, it’s almost certainly a database mismatch in the server side with Battlenet’s internal SQL stuff.
Initially, I thought it was an issue of the link pointing to the wrong place (blog archives do that a lot since blizzard changed their game forums url) but after looking around, I think the msinfo page was intentionally taken down so people don’t end up posting their information into a forum, or that the information it gets ends up exceeding a character limit.
Instead, I found another support topic where a blue wrote this:
I recommend submitting a ticket with an msinfo attached for further investigation. (instructions for collecting that msinfo report will be on the form.)
So if you file the support ticket, that page, allegedly, includes the process to get the msinfo to them. (I haven’t gone through the process to verify anything)
I’m having a hard time believing that anyone with a masters in computer science would call SSD storage “memory” without any clarification to dispell the inevitable confusion or backlash. You had me thinking “RAM doesn’t have limited read/writes… at least, not that anyone needs to worry about.”
Sadly, I know for a fact your point is less of an issue for several players, since we all have to wait for their hard drive disc to load the map.
Yeah, perhaps I should’ve clarified it’s HDD and SSD, but it felt too mouthful. I would’ve just used “RAM” if I was talking about that.
SSDs are not the only ones with limited read/write cycles. But they have a hard limit, while HDDs have a more soft limit.
If you have an old HDD, you will notice how slowly it runs (but it runs nonetheless). That’s because it needs to read the same data several times until it gets it right, as the magnetic field is weakened.
You can still recover data from them tho. There are ways to increase the strength of the reading pins, so they can retrieve the data easier. But that’s just a temporary solution. It’s best to recover whatever important data you have and move it to a new drive.
While SSDs don’t have such luxury. You can’t read bad sectors. The data is structured in a way, where you can recover some information from a bad sector, using some mathematics. And the SSDs do that automatically - they have some spare sectors, which they move the data to. But they are finite. And when too many sectors go bad - you can lose the data inadvertently. And usually it’s a cascading effect. When sectors start going bad, the speed of losing them increases. So you need a new disk/drive ASAP.
That might explain why my 30 year old 6GB Bigfoot drive could only read and write at 10MBps. I just thought that was normal for the time.
Anyway, back to the main topic. I would love for them to go back and see what was changed to maybe find the solution, but I also know that it was introduced so many years ago. That’s going to be a lot of digging.
I’ve also lost faith in companies fixing bugs that persist longer than six months. Nvidia has a bug with their drivers that keeps my monitor shining black instead of off while in standby mode. It’s been reported by several small groups of people for a year and a half now, but I doubt they’ll ever do anything about it.
Def not you. You have a very even keeled and mellow persona on the forums (way more than me).
Do you mean storage? Memories job is to constantly read/write while the computer is on. Regardless, appreciate your perspective. The problem is beyond my expertise, but I’m sure they are aware of it, it is a bigger issue than we know and not worth the resources to fix. It may just be a band-aid until broader updates to the game can be applied.
Does anyone know if Starcraft 2 has the same update bug?
