Update: Tonight I launched my second account and ONLY deleted “WoW ASYNCTHREADSHAREDMEM.1.mutex” and kept the other 3 temp files. The game launched my second account correctly.
Apparently the other 3 temp files have nothing to do with the issue.
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Confirmed, just deleting "WoW ASYNCTHREADSHAREDMEM.1.mutex” worked for me as well. 3 clients open.
Guess I was just really wanting play and nuked too many things when I first looked at this. Allthough I would be curious to know what these files do. They are all zero bytes…
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From a technical standpoint there could be several reasons for “zero bytes”. Especially with a temp file that the user would not normally be aware of. Something is being read then reset. We’re getting an erroneous result because (a) another file is looking for something here & not finding it, or (b) a routine is looking to see if this temp file exists - which tells a process to stop - and the loading process is not deleting it properly. or … there are other possibilities as well.
It’s probably the case - as often happens in large projects - that one programmer did not properly annotate his changes, so when it was handed off to or incorporated into routines written by another, how to handle certain variables and subroutines was lost. In thousands of lines of code it can be a pain to track down.
The ingame ticket-response boiler plate includes the suggestion that if the problem persists a ticket should be refiled. We should follow Blizzard’s suggestion.
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Confirmed: Deleted that one file and a fourth client launched.
I was thinking similarly. A routine could do something like an “if exists” call for some reason, and if it does exist don’t do something (e.g. launch). But something isn’t deleting that file when it should.
From the file name, it appears to have something to do with the running threads…
Reposting the suggestion.
Seems like everything is back to normal after maintenance today. I could open 4 clients without having to manually delete the zero bite files each time. Great job everyone who participated in finding the solutions and workarounds for this bug until we have a fix.
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QFT:
Worked for me as well.
Now all Blizzard has to do is convince me it’s stable & that they recognize our lost time, gameplay, etc. Not demanding any financial compensation, just hope they acknowledge the cost of their error publicly. Blue post here or something.
But most importantly, my thanks as well to everyone. We’ve shown that it’s possible to stay polite & loyal customers while vigorously insisting on getting what we’ve paid for.
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Probalby answers question about route blizzard is going with multiboxing
Now based on the policy, actually multiboxing without multiinput keystrokes still sounds ok, but the fact that they are hard stancing against multiboxing in any kind of way for first time also suggests that their stance on it is already beginning to shift.
Yeah, and they took down: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/11704
which specifically stated multiboxing was OK. you can still see it on wayback machine.
Edit: I guess it got moved here: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/24258
I’d imagine this change affecting many multiboxers on Windows, not so much for mac users since we don’t even have any input keystroke broadcasting software available on the macOS in the first place. But you’re right, seeing them changing their stance right now might eventually affect the folks who enjoy multiboxing, without using those softwares, mostly for the RP and challenges. Hopefully that won’t happen; otherwise, it is actually a healthy change for the game.
This is completely different and a separate issue from the ability open multiple clients. How about when I want to compare characters? Nothing whatsoever to do with slaving/mirroring keystrokes using third party software. If Blizzard didn’t want me running multiple clients their CS staff would not have responded to a general question with very specific information on the optimal way to RaF myself.
Let’s not derail the thread with tangential issues. Especially important for MVPs that post without having previously contributed to the overall topic. Sort of gives the impression of someone who only uses Windows trying to give advice to Mac users. I’m sure you don’t want to come across like that 
His post is relevant to this topic as it warns users here that are multiboxing (running more than one client at a time) that software that sends keystrokes to all clients at once is no longer allowed. Whether it’s from a Windows perspective or a macOS perspective is irrelevant. All that matters is that players that see this topic, resolved or not, will also see the warning as well and will be able to make proper judgements regarding their multiple accounts going forward.
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I’ve never used anything like that. I have each of my toons set up with hotkeys to mount and macros to follow each other. I rarely play the same class at the same time.
I do sort of try to be consistent with were a type spell is located on action bar / hotkey. For instance “c” is where I put the stun-type spells and r" is where all the spell interrupts go.
But, I have to click into the different windows to set focus and all that.
Much fun!
my context was more along the lines that the priority to fix an issue like this may be lowered by the fact that they are going in opposite direction with their stance on multiboxing. Now this may just be a bug that still gets fixed for other reasons, but the point is blizzard isn’t going to go “hey devs, fix this multiboxing bug” not when the companies new stance on it is going in the opposite direction.
That blog most literlly means that this issue is probably furthest thing from mind, unless of course the bug in question is actually causing other issues as well.
If the simple fact that if they didn’t want us to do it they wouldn’t have restored the functionality isn’t enough …
This is the official policy as updated 2 days ago:
The sentence directly relevant to this thread is the first of the two in Blizzard’s simple direct statement.
Multiboxing, or playing multiple World of Warcraft accounts at once, is not a violation of our End User License Agreement.
No need for further speculation. Pretty hard to misinterpret that sentence.
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