Ever since the big patch update early in the week I have not been to play the game. I can log into Battlenet just fine. Playing the game is a different kettle of fish. I have done literally short of removing the game and reinstalling it. Drivers updates, Bios update, remove Battlenet and reinstall it, scan and repair the game, removed cache, WTF and interface, installed windows 10 and ALL the damn updates after realizing my OS was Windows 8 (yeah, I know, my bad), run diagnostics on every damn thing I could, checked to make sure my OS is in 64bit mode (the aforementioned patch update switched to 32bit mode on me), triple checked for Windows updates, updated my router , reversed the wires for my router and unplugged my router to rest it. Looking online to find solutions one of the things that keeps coming up is there seems to be an issue with 13th and 14th gen new GPUs for the 850058 error message. My PC is an Acer Z3-710 with an i3 4170T CPU and a built in GPU. Definitely not a 13th or 14th gen GPU
This is the message I keep getting. World of Warcraft could not start up due to compatibility mode for WoW.exe and Launcher.exe and attempt to launch the game again. For steps to disable compatibility mode, see http://www.battle.net/support/article/850058 Think the damn link works? Not a chance in hell. Even logged into my Blizzard account the link doesn’t show up. Anyone else having issues like this?
No idea if this is the “compatability mode” they’re talking about, but find your WoW.exe (should be in the WoW folder\_retail_) and right click and properties. Go to the Compatability tab and make sure the “Run this program in compatability mode” option is not enabled. Do the same for the wow launcher in the base folder.
Sounds like you’re unfortunately going to have to do a reinstall. What I would do is fins the WTF folder (I always thought that was a funny name) and copy it somewhere else then completely uninstall WOW and all folders.
Then just paste it back in when you get WOW working.
I tried the link, and yeah it doesn’t work. It’s not even available on the archive dot org wayback machine.
Hopefully a fix is coming soon! The cynic in me says Microsoft, owners of Blizzard, would quite like it if everyone was railroaded into upgrading their computer.
But OP’s computer is a very low end computer. It’s a ~$600 all-in-one with integrated graphics literally thousands of % worse than the minimum required for Midnight and a CPU that’s on par with the minimum specs for OG Mists of Pandaria (and did not even come close to the GPU minimum requirement).
It is absolutely time for them to upgrade.
Things were bound to stop working eventually by trying to force that thing to run modern games. It wasn’t built for gaming in the first place.
If they can figure something out to get it to run again, awesome.
But, man. You can’t hold on to ancient tech forever and expect it to be okay.
If it was 11 years old but it was the top end at the time, yeah, they’d probably be okay. They’d be feeling it soon but they’d be okay. But 11 years old with bottom of the barrel hardware? No.
When I worked in sales I found it difficult to understand the behavior of people in different financial situations than me. The only frame of reference that made sense to me was someone having income similar to my own.
But everyone is doing the best they can, and buying what they can afford to. It’s not so simple as “you need to upgrade”. WoW used to work on just about any computer, even ones that were well behind the times.
Oh I’m not saying everyone can afford it.
If you can’t upgrade it you can’t upgrade it.
But even if you can’t afford it, you can’t expect what you have to last forever.
It’s just not realistic.
When WoW was older, MOST gaming could be done on budget machines without dedicated high end hardware.
That era of gaming is mostly passed. If you aren’t sticking to older or retro-styled games, you have to have hardware to keep up now. It’s been that way for awhile.
If you take good care of your possessions, many of them will outlive you.
I hope we can reach a point where people don’t want more lighting effects, more shadow effects, more sparkles. None of this frivol has improved WoW’s gameplay. And some of it has even made the game harder to play since you can’t tell what’s going on.
That has nothing to do with a PC not keeping up with the demands of the modern products it has to run.
There will always be games that intentionally go for older graphical styles.
But people will never fully stop chasing improvements if there are improvements to make.
Any increase in detail has the potential to make it slightly less clear what’s going on, but it doesn’t mean the average user doesn’t prefer the game looking better anyway.
We might reach that point out of necessity if PC Parts don’t drop back down in the future though. Companies won’t make products that require more power if people literally can’t afford the hardware for it anymore.
It wouldn’t matter if the OP blew out the fans weekly. It’s a 4th generation intel I3 CPU that was still running windows 8. Obsolescence happens fast in the computer world, Moore’s law describes why.