Hey folks,
Thanks for all the logs for this issue. We’ve had our Battle.net team look them over and they think they know the problem and are working on a fix. There’s no ETA for when it will be in, but if we get word of it we’ll let you know, or we’ll reach out after we get confirmation that it’s in.
This is still an issue. Played earlier today and while attempting to log in again this afternoon retail launched classic and started the update loop mentioned above. And news on a fix?
I too am having the same issue. battlenet updated a patch and now have wowclassic.exe in the retail folder and both wow classic and retail both load wow classic
Edit: read some of the notes above, confirmed my 60+gig retail folder was replaced by a 4gig folder that matched my classic folder. restarted my computer and its now doing a 60gb update to retail so its redownloading the whole game. I see from the comments this was an issue from over a month ago that appears to be happening again today.
Tried to move the classic.exe file into the classic folder but there was already one there. Tried to use WoWLauncher.exe from retail and it opened the Launcher to BfA version and started a 60 gig update. Half way through now and the game is playable and opens to the BfA game screen. Will try again when the update is done.
This just happened to me today after my game unexpectedly crashed which is the first time I’ve had wow crash in 5+ years.
Hey folks,
Still on our radar, but it requires multiple teams to work on since it’s part WoW and part Battle.net application level coding. The bug also causes other problems which we’re seeking to fix with the fix, which makes this a bit more complicated. Our battle.net application team and WoW teams are both working together on this. If you have this problem for now, try repairing the game and reinstall it if it fails.
Still an issue, crazy how we can go nearly 2 months and you guys can’t figure out a fix. Sucks for people like me with limited data, I have to trust that “reinstalling the game” fixes the issue with your crappy client. Thanks alot, Blizz. Real helpful. Both instances of the game open up retail. I don’t want to play retail. Fix your crap, don’t force me to reinstall.
What a joke.
While we get that this is an annoying issue, the fix requires somewhat severe overhauls to the Battle.net app coding. We’re pretty sure we know what to do, but it still requires testing to ensure that we do not break anything else with the fix. Once it’s done we’ll have to do a major patch to the Battle.net client. I’ll let you all know once we release the build to retest this, but there’s no ETA on it yet. Either way, we appreciate y’all hanging tight and providing all the information we requested previously. It helped narrow things down.
Has this problem been fixed? I was looking for a solution and got sent here. This same issue happened to me today, where I was played this morning and came back this evening and could not launch WoW Retail but instead repeatedly launched Classic.
I restarted my computer and it started a 50GB+ download.
same problem today. launching retail instead launched classic. restarted computer and now having to reinstall retail, waiting on 55 GB download.
Encountered this issue tonight, Ran the repair tool to no avail, the wow classic exe was in the retail folder. currently uninstalled retail and classic and in the process of re downloading retail (very slow net pretty large ordeal to troubleshoot) will not re install classic in hopes this does not occur again.
Pretty sure its me too. Does it go along with this thread I created a few hours ago? My issues are ongoing. Thx
Yep, this happened to me this afternoon 16/7. Never encountered the issue before and when I tried to do a repair that failed. I also tried a few fixes I read on various forums until I got the shts with it all and am now in the middle of reinstalling WoW. Guess Blizzard never really fixed the issue.
I love reading their initial replies to everyone “Your fault. Check your folders. Reinstall.” knowing it’s always their fault.
Hey y’all!
Previously, the devs put in measures to fight this, which is why reports dropped off a while ago. We’ve seen a spike in contacts in the past couple days, though. Can you please gather battle.net logs for us:
And then email them here for me:
To: techinfo@blizzard.com
Subject: Attn: Drakuloth - Classic Client Uninstalls Retail
If you’re unable to email them due to a size limit, please upload the logs to a hosting site of your choosing and send a link to it in your email instead. Thanks for letting us know this is back, and sorry it’s getting in the way of your gaming.
In the mean time, the most reliable available workaround is unfortunately to reinstall the game client.
This just happened to me as well, why? wow… 
Still seeing this issue almost 4 months later. Played fine last night, started battle.net today to a small update. Tried to launch BFA and it repeatedly launched Classic. Checked retail folder and WoWClassic launcher is there. I deleted and repaired, it reinstalled WoWClassic. Now it is completely re-downloading retail. RIP to about 2-3 days of gametime to download this again.
Hey there,
It looks like the engineers still have this on their radar. It seems to be impacting a very small number of unique accounts. We ask any user who is affected by this to send logs mentioned by Drakuloth in this post.
Thanks for following up with us on this!
so this was suppost to be fix and i just got hit by this. After not playing the game for a while i come back and Bnet do a scan on the game and make me dowload 36gb of data for no reason at all.
What the hell is going on.