Crash Report: Warcraft III: Reforged, Apple Silicon Mac
Hardware and operating system
This computer is a MacBook Pro, 13-inch, 2020, model identifier MacBookPro17,1. The chip is Apple M1, with 8 cores: 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. The memory is 16 GB. The operating system is macOS Sequoia 15.6.1, build 24G90.
Battle.net account
The Battle.net client version is 2.52.8.17651, retail. The account region is EU, with country Germany.
Game installation
The product is Warcraft III: Reforged, retail branch, not the Legacy branch. The build number is 23745. The version is War III 2.0.4. The install path is /Applications/Warcraft III/retail/x86_64/Warcraft III.app. The binary architecture is x86_64, with an ad-hoc code signature and no team identifier.
History of this problem
This installation worked correctly on this same Mac about two years ago, near the end of 2024. At that time, many Blizzard forum posts reported a patch that removed the Mac game executable file from the release. This patch broke Reforged for all Mac users. A later update, named 2.0, fixed the launch problem for many users.
Mac support stayed unstable after this 2.0 update. Other Blizzard forum posts from this time report three different problems: a black screen with audio, a crash 5 to 10 minutes into a multiplayer game, and the error “error in handling the request 6:9”. The current crash, under build 23745, is a different crash from these three.
Symptom
When I select Play in Battle.net, the game icon appears in the Dock for a short time. Then the icon disappears. Battle.net shows no error message. The game shows no window.
First problem found and corrected
An old Battle.net Agent process, from a previous session, ran with root permission. This process blocked the authentication step between Battle.net and the local Agent. Each launch attempt produced the error “Agent init returned status code=401”, many times in a row. After many attempts, Battle.net stopped the launch, with the error “Failed to communicate with Agent after launch, attempts=124”.
I stopped all Battle.net and Agent processes, then started Battle.net again. This step corrected the authentication problem.
Second problem, not yet corrected
After the first fix, the game process starts, and passes authentication. The game process starts the Metal graphics system with no error. The War3Log.txt file shows a complete, correct list of GPU features. This list confirms that Rosetta 2 and the graphics system work with no error.
The game process then contacts the Blizzard content delivery network, through the NGDP protocol. The game process completes a step named “Prepatch”. Immediately after this step, the game process stops with an error.
The crash
The crash type is EXC_BAD_ACCESS, at address 0x0000000000000048. This is a null poincode. The crash happens inside the function CFRetain. The com.blizzard.WarcraftIIIcode calls this function. Blizzard removed the symbol names from this code, in the release build.
This crash happens on 5 of 5 launch attempts, at the same point and the same address each time. This crash happens when the game starts from Battle.net. This crash also happens when the game
starts directly from a terminal, with the same launch arguments.
Steps already tried, with no effect on this crash
- I stopped all Battle.net and Agent processes, then started Battle.net again. This roblem, not the crash.
- I ran “Scan and Repair” for Warcraft III, inside Battle.net. This step corrected some files. This step did not correct the crash. - I ran a forced update, after the repair step. This step found no additional file c
- I deleted the local NGDP cache folder, at path /Applications/Warcraft III/Data/ecache. This folder had a stale lock file, named index.lock.0. The game built a new cache folder, with no error. The crash still occurred.
- I confirmed that Rosetta 2 works, and that the game binary runs with the correct architecture.
Please help me fix this.