This has just started in the last week or two. Unlike other stutter issues I’ve had in the past it happens on all game screens, including on the menu screen right after the game first starts up. It also affects both the visuals and the audio, so that the screen freezes and the audio cuts out for half a second each time. The game can be problem-free for minutes at a time, or it can happen several times in a few seconds. It is not tied to how much is going on in the game, but it does come and go, so I might get a whole match without it, and then halfway through a game it will get bad and stay bad for the next hour. Nothing else is changing on the system in that time.
I have two macs: a 2020 mac mini with M1, 16GB, Ventura 13.4.1, and a 2012 mac mini with i7, 16GB, High Sierra 10.13.6. This bug affects both, except that the older mac has it much worse, with more frequent stutters. This is odd for me - previous bugs have either affected one mac but not the other, or have affected both equally. Activity monitor on both macs says the system has plenty of CPU idle and no real memory pressure. However, the stutter happens less often when I have no other apps open than when I have loads open - but it does still happen, just a little less often. When the bug started I was using only the newer computer, and had not used or updated the older computer’s game in several days, at which point it was running perfectly; after a few days of this I switched back to the older computer and straight away the bug was already there.
On the newer mac the audio cutting out during matches sometimes causes the current music or audio clip to start over, so that I have to listen to eg a hero’s intro speech three or four times in a row, sometimes as many as eight. On the older mac this doesn’t happen, despite the stutters being much more frequent. Recently in the middle of a match all sound stopped entirely, and didn’t come back until I restarted the whole app (this was not due to accidentally disabling sound) - this has never happened to me before.
I have tried restarting, updating, fixing and reinstalling.
In case it’s relevant, I had until recently a different kind of stutter on the newer mac, which I posted about here: Constant micro-lag throughout matches To be clear: this was NOT the same kind of stutter. However the older bug spontaneously disappeared a few weeks ago, after months of being a problem (from perhaps February through June). I then had the authentication screen problems like everyone else, then a few days of no problems, followed by this new stutter starting up.