Hi there,
I decided to get back into World of Warcraft with my nephew. But the install will not work. I am stuck at “initializing,” and it doesn’t go anywhere. I’ve tried all I could with some of the tips here. I removed Battle.net from my computer several times, restarted, etc.
@Blizzard, please help!
CW
If your nephew has an installation on his [Mac] computer, you can always try copying that to your machine.
You’ll need to download and install the Launcher, point it at WoW’s directory, and it should find it. If it complains, a repair should work.
It is a known issue they refuse to fix.
You need to pull the indices folder from a working install on a pc or another mac. Just had to do this myself to get a fresh install working.
Yikes! Doesn’t this keep people from subscribing or paying? It would seem like an issue they’d want to fix…
You would think but apparently not. Thankfully I have access to an old install I would have been even more ticked if I had to drag out some windows virtual machine setup to get those files.
Precisely what I’m in the midst of doing right now. I don’t have an old install anywhere so virtual machines it is…
They’re silently killing Mac support. Too many tech hurdles, Metal vs DirectX, now x86 vs ARM/Apple Silicon. If they cared about Mac users at all, they would have posted in one of these threads over the past six months this has been a problem. They’d have fixed the problem that’s been going on for months. They don’t care.
I’m still on an Intel Mac, so I can play via Boot Camp, but honestly their lack of communication or willingness to fix this problem does not provide any confidence whatsoever in WoW’s future.
so true bet their not having no problems taking money from peoples accounts.
I’m having the same issue, the battle.net launcher is stuck on ‘updating’ World of Warcraft Classic, saying ‘Initializing… please wait’
I’ve had the same issue
So WoW is just never going to be fixed for Mac I guess…
It isn’t WoW that’s broken it’s the Battle.net client. You want more eyes on this issue? Then post in either the Battle.net Mac Tech Support forum or the Battle.net Desktop App Feedback Forum.
Same problem. Brand new Macbook Pro M3 13’ and can’t get past initialization stage. Tried most of the solutions posted here but nothing has worked. Ridiculous.
How do you copy it? I tried airdropping and it didn’t work. Maybe because I didn’t stall the launcher.
How do you download and install just the launcher?
I generally download the launcher fresh from Blizzard as it’s small and needs to be kept updated.
For the actual WoW copy:
The retail client is inside a subdirectory called _retail_ (so the directory structure looks like World of Warcraft\_retail_).
You can copy and paste the entire client (e.g. _retail_ or all of World of Warcraft) onto a USB drive, from the source machine. This can then be transferred to the target machine. I don’t know that I’d use AirDrop as it’s very large.
Normally, I delete the Cache folder from inside the _retail_ directory as it isn’t needed.
Shut down Launcher and WoW while you’re doing any of this.
By launcher, do you mean the battle.net app?
I’ll give this another shot, thanks !
Some how, by chance world of warcraft gets downloaded on my macbook. It launches fine, the cinematic trailer plays, but immediately after the game crashes.
I’ve tried manually removing all files of battle.net and wow and re-installing 3 times now without luck.
Has this happened to anyone else, and if so found a solution?
In the meantime, I’ll try manually moving the files from my other mac that I somehow got to work a couple months ago.
@Topochic - Change the permissions on the World of Warcraft install folder to read/write for everyone and then also apply it to enclosed folders.
can also type the following in terminal to give permissions recursively:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o+rwX /Applications/“World of Warcraft”/*
If your default install is in /Application/World of Warcraft… otherwise change the path to your folder.
Most likely its trying to read a protected file and is just crashing.