Happened a bunch in 2024. Resolved after a week.
Happening pretty much daily again now, for the past week. Each time, it’s quickly solved by pointing the launcher to where the games are installed, but it’s strange that it happens again every day, even after pointing it to where the games are. The game installation directories haven’t changed for each game. (WoW and Hearthstone in this case)
This of course is not normal or expected behavior, and could indicate a issue with drive permissions, or even the drive itself. If it continues reinstalling the app launcher might be indicated. Also check the drive for issues.
I’m getting this same annoying issue this morning (though pointing bnet to the correct folder fails - like several other threads in this sub, I have the game installed to a custom drive directory, which seems to be an issue for bnet to handle properly).
Also I’m going to go with this being tied to the latest Windows update - everything was working fine until I rebooted to pick up the latest update, and now nothing works.
Note that I can launch the game manually running wow.exe from the retail subfolder and log in that way - so no, there isn’t an actual issue on my end other than bnet and Windows not getting along for some reason.
That’s almost always a permissions issue you can go into the folder that you had it in and retake ownership of the folder Windows likes to take ownership of the folders and that kind of messes up the app
I tried that - it didn’t work - but thanks for the attempt to help.
Also tried the support article of ‘launch manually from install directory’, which also didn’t work (as far as letting bnet recognize the install).
The next option listed on the support article is ‘uninstall and reinstall’, which I’ll do when the prepatch goes live as I tend to clean up everything at that time anyway.
As I mentioned, I can launch the game with the wow.exe so not wasting time reinstalling game (and setting everything up again) just to skip typing my password by using the bnet launcher.
Battlenet located in the same folder. Also make sure battle letters running as the administrator
Logged in today and its asking me to install the game. Have not done anything to my computer or made any updates so not sure why it is doing this today.
I had a similar issue today after being able to play last night. Here’s what I did that worked:
Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft (Or wherever the install is)
Delete the battle.net folder
go to the retail folder and delete the WoW exe file
Go back to the Program Files (x86) folder, right click on the World of Warcraft folder, select properties, UNCHECK read-only, click apply and make sure it includes all subfolders.
It should take a couple seconds to apply that setting
Launch task manager and nuke all battlenet processes
Launch battle net, click install, select the same file path WoW is already installed to, run the install, and after a few seconds it should be good to go.
No idea if this will work for you, but it worked for me.
Edit: Once the install is working, the World of Warcraft folder will revert back to read-only as it should