I had no trouble getting into the game earlier tonight for our guild raid. I was having issues with targeting during the raid, so decided to close out the game to do some maintenance check and the launcher just kept on initializing…without any progress.
I’ve rebooted my pc and opened the launcher again only to be faced with the exact same problem…Why is the launcher failing to progress with the initializing? Now I can’t get back into the game.
BTW while I was waiting to try again, I had no trouble doing research on other sites, also opened up Youtube for a review I was interested in, all at the same time. During all this time nothing else was affected at all like the Bnet launcher. It is its own beast and Bliz owns that monster.
it’s wild that this game has been out 20 years and their launcher is still just the absolute worst. It’s the slowest downloading/updating launcher out. I’ve been downloading at 19kb/s for this frog fix or whatever for the last 10 mins. And i have gigabit fiber internet.
mine does this with initializing and patching. basically i have to baby sit the launcher while its trying to patch. if it pauses for few moments i have to pause it and resume immediately it kicks off working again. Patches downloading go down to a few kb/s and have to pause and resume and again immediately it rockets back upto where it should be. Been this way on 3 different devices and networks for me and a few people for around 3 years now i just assume its the norm?
You guys should check your HDD/SSD usage in the task manager when it’s happening. You will likely see that it’s under very heavy usage and that your CPU might have some usage going on as well.
Basically, it’s analyzing and probably reorganizing the contents of the pak files to prepare for the actual download and to do it more efficiently. Think of the pak files(they are numerically labeled in the folder like data.35 and so on, but they are what most would simply call a pak file) like a mini harddrive spread out over the ~100 <=1gb pak files in the data folder, and then running a “defrag” on it. There can be a lot of empty space in them, so moving things around to minimize the space between assets, means you can have larger contiguous empty chunks for assets that might need more space; in order to avoid having to fragment them or having to add more *.pak files to the list. While doing that, it has to keep updating the registry of them all in the *.idx files(assuming that’s what they are, based on their small sizes).
Long story short, you have a slow drive, a weak CPU or some kind of security settings are slowing down the IO process of it all.
I’ve found that sometimes you can spur this on by closing the BNet client, then opening the task manager and killing “Agent.exe” on top of that. Reload Bnet.
You may need to repeat this more than once.
Much as this is possible I don’t think it accounts for most of the people seeing this. I can say from personal experience that an NVMe 980 Pro with a 5800X3D shows almost zero load while it’s dawdling.
Could be some kind of stalled worker thread issue or something along those lines, if forcing agent closed rectifies the issues. But again, bad security settings can also cause issues like this if their being overzealous on IO operations.
A couple of years ago I experienced the very same thing, so I took my pc to my technician who built it and we upgraded a lot of hardware (fairly inexpensively since we only purchased what was necessary) and then he replaced my hard drives with SSDs (I have several). He setup my pc so that only what was necessary to work together on one SSD then reorganized my other folders with non-critical files onto a separate SSD. That fixed my problems for years.
This last time had nothing to do with my pc since it was recently updated and everything scanned and checked for bottle necks. It seems to be the launcher more than anything. I do wish Bliz would actually address their own programming bottle necks.
If it’s not the usual stuff I mentioned earlier, then it’s likely the folder permissions issue that’s popped up a few times here and there. I think sometimes when Windows updates from one major build like 22H2 to 23H2, it can screw with permissions on things(haven’t personally tested it to verify, it’s just a hunch).
The only way to correct it reliably is to uninstall WoW, completely delete the left over directory and then completely reinstall it again. That way, the folder, all subfolders and all files within them have brand new permissions attached to it and Windows/security apps don’t flake out over it.
I have had a similar problem in the past but now bnet keeps telling me it needs to update and no matter how many times I restart it still says it needs to update.