Mac users have to learn code

Yes, I know there are other threads about this, but this seems like where things are headed. I’ve played WoW since 2007, with half of that time being on a MacBook Pro. Yesterday around 5pm Eastern, my Battle.net app started glitching out. It asked that I allow the app to make changes, which I did. From there, I sat in a gridlock of watching WoW and WoW Classic “update” which really means “sitting at 0%”. So, I went to the forums and found the “WoW won’t update” thread, where a blueposter told us all they were handling it, and in the meantime to use the “sudo chmod -R 777 /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/Data” to circumvent their broken launch app.

So, looking at this from a layman’s eye, a game which up until now has been completely accessible to any internet user who understands terms of agreement, now requires that you learn how to read your computer’s genome and play around in it like a digital Crispr. Is this the future for Mac players? every patch we have to wait a week for the customer support to tell the tech side “btw, you need to make it run on Mac, too.” Will Blizzard reimburse us for the time that they’ve locked us out? as of today they owe me about 50c, but multiplied by the number of Mac players, aren’t they essentially embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars? Will this come up in the lawsuits? that they are charging money for THE TIME TO PLAY a game so broken that the launch app won’t even let me play it.

Seriously disappointed in Blizzard, but I can’t say I’m surprised

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Changing a permission on a directory is a hackers job.
Your superiority is amazing. Thanks for sharing.

Well like many I’ve been unable to login for 16 hrs. This problem of not updating and permission errors doesn’t inspire confidence that the problem is being resolved within the short-term. Well lets see what tomorrow brings.

its not just on a mac computer, i am on a windows pc and it isnt working for me either and i seen a few other pc users having the issue as well in the forum posts (as there are several forum posts on this)

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Changing permissions on a directory isn’t “learning to code” no matter how unfamiliar you are with the process. Furthermore, it’s important to understand when something is just a workaround until a more permanent solution is found and deployed.

I also think that some people are losing sight of the fact that WoW even running on Mac’s at all is kind of an unusual and great thing in the industry, so maybe lay off the hyperbole a bit while they sort through what’s going on?

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Hey there,

I noticed a few other options posted above this, but I did also want to mention that this is a Terminal command. It can be copied and pasted into the terminal to enter it. I know it looks kinda scary but it’s easier than it looks for sure.

Instructions:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. Copy the command posted above
  3. Paste the command into the Terminal
  4. Enter the command
  5. Close Terminal

It’s definitely not ideal for sure and our game developers / quality assurance team is working to fix the main bug. Our support staff is only able to provide ways around the bug in the meantime. Thankfully it looks like more possible solutions are popping up if this one is unwanted.

I do hope the info helps. If there’s anything else you might need just let us know.

5 Likes

Kaldraydis

This worked for us and my wife says she loves you - whoever you are.

This should be stickied/pinned.

As a person who understand exactly what the permissions/mode mean, I would recommend:

find /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/Data -type d -exec chmod 777 {} ;

Although mode 775 is smarter and far less insecure.

That finds all items in the Data folder that are of type "d"irectory and sets the mode on them… this does not make the normal files also world writeable and world executable like the above recursive command does… use “sudo” before the command if it is needed, but if you are an admin user and owner of the files you should not need to.

And, yes, this is a workaround, not a fix as it just reverts after like 5 or 10 minutes (although once the process is loaded you are good for a while.)

P.S. The problem is e"x"ecute on directories means allow scanning of the files in the directory, this is why the ‘permissions’ error… the process can not scan the filesystem structure…

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Ugh why so difficult? This did not work for me… thanks for trying :wink:

Don’t be a tool, for some folks, diggin into that layer of things is not what they got a computer for. And the OP is right, doing that sort of thing 100% should not be a condition of playing this game.
Blizzard does this to us more and more often now, and it IS frustrating, because it SHOULDN’T be happening.

1 Like

Hi there, just a heads up for other folks who try this. It didn’t work the first time since I was logged in as a regular user on the Mac. Logging in as the Admin worked and when I logged back in as a user I was able to start the update and then get in the game.

Thanks! (edit: I didn’t realize this was an old thread - I was having trouble getting the updater to start after the game update on 12-28-21)