9.1.5 crashing game & MacBook Pro (Monterey 12.1)

Hello – I haven’t played a lot of 9.1.5, but it’s the holidays so… WoW it is! Unfortunately, the game is repeatedly crashing and restarting my computer.

I have tried disabling all add ons. I have tried closing the battlenet app after launching the game. I typically don’t play with any peripherals (keyboard, mouse). That’s right, keyboard turner.

I haven’t had this issue previously, so I am hoping for some assistance. Thank you! <3

Specs:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
Processor 2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
Memory 32 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X
Graphics Intel Iris Plus Graphics 1536 MB

Crash Report 1:

Process: WindowServer [-1]
Path: ???
Identifier: WindowServer
Version: ???
Code Type: 00000000 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [Unknown]
User ID:

Date/Time: 2021-12-27 09:15:15.0874 -0600
OS Version: macOS 12.1 (21C52)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: C39A5229-695B-B14E-B3C6-92032CD476B6

System Integrity Protection:

Notes:
resampled 1 of 1850 threads with truncated backtraces from 0 pids:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Crashed Thread: Unknown

Exception Type:

Termination Reason: Namespace WATCHDOG, Code 1 monitoring timed out for service
(1 monitored services unresponsive): checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context:
is_alive_func returned unhealthy : Display 69734272 not ready: DisplayID: 0x4280f80
Surface Use Counts: 1(3) 3(1) 7(1)
FB RegID: 4294968372, On Glass SurfaceIDs: 3 7 1, Transactions: [ Active: SurfaceID: 3 ] [ Waiting: SurfaceID: 7 ] [ Waiting: Surface
40 seconds since last successful checkin, 315 total successsful checkins si

Error Formulating Crash Report:
resampled 1 of 1850 threads with truncated backtraces from 0 pids:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Backtrace not available

No thread state (register information) available

Binary Images:
Binary images description not available

Crash Report 2:

Process: WindowServer [-1]
Path: ???
Identifier: WindowServer
Version: ???
Code Type: 00000000 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [Unknown]
User ID:

Date/Time: 2021-12-27 12:19:29.7811 -0600
OS Version: macOS 12.1 (21C52)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: C39A5229-695B-B14E-B3C6-92032CD476B6

System Integrity Protection:

Notes:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Crashed Thread: Unknown

Exception Type:

Termination Reason: Namespace WATCHDOG, Code 1 monitoring timed out for service
(1 monitored services unresponsive): checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context:
is_alive_func returned unhealthy : Display 69734272 not ready: DisplayID: 0x4280f80
Surface Use Counts: 3(1) 9(3) 11(1)
FB RegID: 4294968372, On Glass SurfaceIDs: 3 11 9, Transactions: [ Active: SurfaceID: 3 ] [ Waiting: SurfaceID: 11 ] [ Waiting: Surf
40 seconds since last successful checkin, 9 total successsful checkins sinc

Error Formulating Crash Report:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Backtrace not available

No thread state (register information) available

Binary Images:
Binary images description not available

Crash Report 3:

Process: WindowServer [-1]
Path: ???
Identifier: WindowServer
Version: ???
Code Type: 00000000 (Native)
Parent Process: ??? [Unknown]
User ID:

Date/Time: 2021-12-27 12:24:39.7804 -0600
OS Version: macOS 12.1 (21C52)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: C39A5229-695B-B14E-B3C6-92032CD476B6

System Integrity Protection:

Notes:
resampled 14 of 1341 threads with truncated backtraces from 0 pids:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Crashed Thread: Unknown

Exception Type:

Termination Reason: Namespace WATCHDOG, Code 1 monitoring timed out for service
(1 monitored services unresponsive): checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context:
is_alive_func returned unhealthy : Display 69734272 not ready: DisplayID: 0x4280f80
Surface Use Counts: 3(1) 8(3) 11(1)
FB RegID: 4294968372, On Glass SurfaceIDs: 3 11 8, Transactions: [ Active: SurfaceID: 3 ] [ Waiting: SurfaceID: 11 ] [ Waiting: Surf
40 seconds since last successful checkin, 36 total successsful checkins sin

Error Formulating Crash Report:
resampled 14 of 1341 threads with truncated backtraces from 0 pids:
This is a watchdog-triggered termination event, and not expected to be well-represented in the legacy crash format

Backtrace not available

No thread state (register information) available

Binary Images:
Binary images description not available

this seems terrible. Apparently, since 9.1.5 TONS of macOS users have reported extreme FPS drops compared to before and also tons of macOS users have reported crashes like you.

):

It seems blizzard cares cause I believe they’ve mentioned it but they haven’t yet done anything about it. It’s too bad cause I think the macOS side of blizzard is VERY SMALL like just a few people at most I imagine.

Thank you for the sympathy for my situation. I do miss my blood elf and her icy spells.

Hopefully some of the smart Mac folks here may have ideas of what I could try. :pleading_face:

I was having the same type of issues; however, mine wasn’t shutting down, rather freezing the image on my external monitor and then hanging the game. Even when I forced-quit WoW, the screen would still display and any movement to the external monitor cause the entire MacBook to hang up.

After two days of troubleshooting and working with Blizzard, I think that what we are seeing is a MacOS driver issue relating to the video card, and how the OS handles graphics switching for performance and energy consumption.

Without detailing everything I tried, the simple resolution was this. I ended up Boot Camping my system with Windows 10, ran all the updates, then installed WoW. On first launch I received a message in WoW stating the video card drivers were out of date (not unusual for Boot Camp), but it got me thinking about the MacOS driver version. It appears that Apple is not using the latest release of the drivers, nor can I get them to manually install in MacOS.

Long story short, I have not had a single crash in Boot Camp, and even used ThrottleStop to do a bit of tuning and turn off the Turbo setting on the chip, which ended up resulting in the system running faster with a higher frame rate at lower temps…go figure!

Having the same problem here on my mac… just hangs up on load-in with an endlessly spinning color wheel of death. My guildies see me as being online and in the game, but I never actually enter the game. Just stuck at the load in screen forever. Actually left if overnight - no change. Have to restart my computer to break out of it. This sucks - been playing on a Mac since November of 2004… starting to feel like if Blizz doesn’t care about me or all the problems that seem associated with the Mac platform, then maybe it’s time for me to not care about them. It’s save me the subscription fee…

1 Like

I think I have a solution here. For whatever reason WoW hits the system really hard. I’d noticed crashes ever since 8.3 and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. But I saw that some full system crashes were caused by WoW sucking up too much CPU. Try launching wow with this command, it makes wow “nicer” to the rest of the system. I saw significant performance increases and have not experienced a crash yet when they were quite frequent before:

nice -n 20 open /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/retail/World\ of\ Warcraft.app