MacOS support

Support Mac Technical Support
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No one knows for sure if Blizzard will continue to support the Mac platform. They are under new ownership. The next 2 years will tell what direction they have for Blizzard as a whole.

We do know that they have essentially gutted the Mac development team. We do know that the M1 client was due to their investing time in a preliminary ARM client of Windows, not so much because they wanted to support the new Mac platform.

The GPU situation on the Mac is still in question. While the CPU side of things runs circles around current Windows architecture, the GPU side of things is still lagging behind in terms of graphics intensive applications such as gaming. Apple has yet to show any real jump in GPU performance. The Mac Pro is their last chance to show whether they can compete with AMD et al.

We know that Blizzard hasn’t offered Mac compatible versions of most of their recent offerings. We know that the next expansion won’t likely hit until 2023 or later. We know that support for WoW has been essentially abysmal during Shadowlands. The newer architecture has it’s own issues just like the older architecture has it’s issues.

So, if you are looking to replace your current rig just so that WoW plays better, that to me would be an unwise investment. If you are replacing it for other reasons and you would “like” to be able to play WoW on it, that’s a different story.

Just in the last year and a half we have seen the M1, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra… the M2 is destined to replace them in short order. Apple is making a lot of changes. Blizzard will be making a lot of changes. Whether that includes the Mac platform going forward, no one here knows.

The key is, if you are concerned about Mac support going forward, then don’t buy a Mac to play games on. The one absolute is that Windows will be supported. If you don’t mind playing WoW on a Mac in a depreciated state, meaning, with limited support due to whatever reason, then go ahead and get a new Mac for playing WoW. Just don’t assume the flagship Mac coming from Apple will be better than it’s PC counterpart when it comes to support and playability.

You need a Mac development team for that. And they gutted their team.

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Excellent feedback Oatmeal. Thank you so much.

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Speaking of the base M1, any idea if it can pull 60 fps at 1080p?

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Without particle effects yes, with some effects around 30FPS (like in combat when a big cast goes out), sometimes worse (bad spots in Bastion etc.). Base M1 has the same problems as other iGPUs - gets easily clogged by memory badwidth (low pixel fill rate). It’s better on higher M1 types.

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Any sources of this? M1 client was released very quickly so they had to work on it before Apple release it so they had some cooperation with Apple. I doubt there is any incentive to drop macOS, especially now when it’s getting popularity. Windows on ARM client looks like a side effect. Any devices currently on the market is pretty much below or at minimal requirements if lucky.

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Popularity? More like hoopla. The Mac user base isn’t growing, especially amongst those who want to game. If you wish to stay with the Mac eco-system you have no other choice than to buy an ARM Mac these days. Just as when PowerPC was replaced by INTEL.

Omegal made mention of the ARM client in past posts. I didn’t find the post I wanted to refer to, but here is one that mentions a similar line. Blizzard has never officially said anything about ARM support. So if you are looking for the from the horses mouth sort of links, you’re not going to find one until it is an absolute. Reality is, Blizzard won’t support both clients for long, typically they drop the older client whenever the new expansion roles out. But abandoning INTEL doesn’t mean ongoing ARM support either.

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In USA it’s quite large. Even in EU there is intrest in this. Not like soldered and overpriced storage and anti-right-to-repair is good but people are going for it.

Retail client supports ARM macOS and I doubt they would just drop it, just because forums think they will.

When they dropped support for GPUs made prior to 2009 in early Shadowlands they affected some old laptop users (10+ years old chips!) and had to look for a fallback.

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I think you’re referring to fact that supporting arm on mac wasn’t about mac, yeah pretty much. Even companies that don’t necessarily care about mac that much, can still see that x86 architecture is lagging behind and arm is massively catching up. Blizzard recognizes that apple’s arm chips are good, really good. They don’t necessarily care about Mac but they do recognize that there may be a future where efforts shift on other platforms toward arm too.

With that in mind, they had the foresight to go “hmm, we can use apple’s SDK and start there but with the idea of future proofing windows in mind”.

And they did that. they have an arm client for windows ready too.

So at end of day, mac got bonus extension of support but I don’t think it should be taken as a commitment to mac by any means, that commitment is still questionable at best since they still have no mac team and mac support issues linger for months with next to no priority.

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Precisely what I’m afraid of Omegal. One thing which confuses me are blue posts like this one “our developers are already on the case to find a resolution here”. What developers? If there is no Mac development team who exactly is working on Mac issues? Or is this just blowing smoke?

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they have developers that aren’t on a mac or windows team that work on all issues, but based on priority. That means that they basically work on windows issues full time and only when there are 0 windows issues left they work on a mac one.

it almost doesn’t matter if mac one is crashing and unplayable and windows issue is a small one. That small windows issue still affect more users than the big mac one.

Most of the times, these decisions are above developers.

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If Blizzard has an ARM Windows version, why would it matter anyway if macOS Support got dropped or not? It seems like we can just play it through CrossOver or Parallels Desktop.

Just curious, perhaps with some performance drops but might be playable regardless.

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The idea of playing through emulation and for every single patch possibly having to wait for a completely separate, outside team of developers to fix problems sounds horrendous.

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Task priority is likely based on severity and not OS or hardware. Each patch has random problems often same on macOS and Windows.

If there was an actual bug causing macOS client to crash it would be mass reported. FUD “it’s crashing” is just FUD. 9.0.5 introduced severe bugs and those were mass reported by macOS and Windows players. Then Blizzard fixed some and said “can’t fix” for few others :slight_smile:

They do seems to follow strict supported hardware list and cadence. Shadowlands saw drop for GPUs that do not support Shader Model 5 which are GPUs made up to 2009. That’s 10+ years old hardware. And even that affected some old laptop users to a point that Blizzard started looking at some fallback mode for said users.

Dropping support for a modern hardware platform would create way bigger backlash and also admitting they can’t hire contractors or hire developers to do any work. They do have problems with recruitment but the low level side - native M1 and WoA clients were done quickly so it was either specialized contractor or they do have low level development team - and they likely work on other Blizzard games, especially those in development like D4 or the mobile Warcraft game… wouldn’t be surprised if they would release WoW for iPadOS at some time.

FF14 has a “mac” client done via CrossOver and other old patched together code. The quality is really bad. You don’t want non-native macOS client…

And Blizzard is a USA based company. Macs in USA are something “obvious”. If you don’t have a macbook you aren’t a “cool developer” there.

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I agree. I mean, Blizzard does show Support for TBC Classic and upcoming Wotlk that has Mac Support. There are no clients available for Patch 3.3.5 at this moment that run past 32bit. So I feel like someone still has to be working there to be updating it to 64bit and even Apple Silicon.

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Actually it took many months and was done in house. It was greenlit because they wanted an arm windows build too. It never would have happened if it was ONLY for macs. They would have been perfectly happy letting it run on rosetta forever like all the other barely mac supported games they have do.

It was also very cost effective. By developing for M1, they got technical and development from apple and dev kits to work with. It was basically a win win situation where they can get their windows arm and have apple provide most of resources for it… it took several months because the backend had a lot of x86 specific instruction sets that needed to be changed. it wasn’t just a matter of firing up a new sdk and hitting compile.

It also took months because it still wasn’t a high priority task so it was kinda a “swap code as you come across it or in free time” type deal.

I don’t see mac support going away any time soon, it’s more or less just gonna be the second hand platform where you’re likely to run into more bugs and issues that sit untasked and unfixed for weeks/months at a time.

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Do you have ANY source for this? macOS client is different than Windows and M1 client was like few days after M1 was revealed - so they had to have access prior to launch. WoA client showed up much later and was a sort of beta and likely still is as amount of WoA devices is super low and badly priced (and barely meet minimal requirements if at all).

Once again Windows client is different, tools are different.

Do you have ANY sources stating they use ASM or other such x86 locked code in the client?

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Just trust that I’m usually well informed. Some of this can be found if you dig hard enough on internet and other stuff is just from fact that half the people in my phone all have (or had) blizzard as their employer

Just trust me, you are uninformed in this case. I’m not saying that’s not true in a lot of other cases, but in this case, you don’t know how much blizzard has streamlined their code over the years.

In fact, did you know that when they removed the itunes remote, quicktime movie recording etc, it was because they were in the process of that unification? They didn’t want to have any feature set that was platform exclusive hinder unification so if it wasn’t supported by everyone, it would not be supported by anyone. That’s the actual reason they stripped all of that out (well, one of them anyways)

They make a huge point to have a unified code base at it’s core, then they have layers on top of it like PRISM which handlers the various rendering technologies (metal, dx11, dx12, etc). Now sometime, there may be feature parity at layer level (such as raytracing for example) but that’s an exception on the layer, at the unified core, there is always parity.

The core code used to have x86 code in it but, as I said it, needed revisions to also support CISC equiv calls where applicable or a different approach.

Going even further back, before Arm, metal and direct x 12 had a similar story. It started on mac but with the future building intent of portability to direct x 12. They used metal to do it. the apis were so similar it was basically just a matter of saying “if mac do this else do dx12 functional equiv”. API wise, it’s relatively simple to make a one for one translation between metal, dx12, and vulkan. It’s why technologies like MoltenVK exist, which basically act as a translation layer that maps function to function between technologies, much in a way that prism does as it sits on top of blizzards unified codebase.

This is actually what makes the lack of mac support on some games the most frustrating of all. Any app that’s running prism structure (which is most of them at this point) could have a mac build running with utter ease. It’s just a matter of not wanting to do everything else that comes with that (tech support, bug fixes, etc). D2R is a weird exception to that, which is structured like a modern wrapper thats running the legacy 32 bit app, which limits it’s functional compatibility with metal (64 bit only)

The unified code structure works hugely in macs favor though. It does help us get a lot more feature parity. More over, it helps get more stuff a green light if the work can be used across the board. Since apple tends to adopt technologies faster and more strictly than windows, it’s often a great place to start building support for new technologies with intent to make use of it globally and not just for mac support. In fact I can honestly say metal and arm coming as fast as they did were purely because of this reason and not as a demonstration of a “we want everyone to enjoy our games, big or small” attitude. that attitude has been gone a LONG time.

Believe me, there are people fighting to support us at blizzard, it’s a management/production issue from high up that says we’re too insignificant of a margin to invest actual resources on.

Activision barely keeps enough staff on hand as is for the windows work loads. As they expand into more games, or more versions of games, you think they are scaling up tools, server, engine in equilibrium? they are not. When it comes to engineering side of things, they always have too much work and not enough time. They actually do a decent job making sure each games team is sized well, but the ones holding literally all the games up, that talent is hard to find and harder to keep and it’s just never enough.

So yes, the TL/DR is
if they do something on the mac like add M1 or something, it’s because a developer, who probably does have mac passion, managed to convince someone higher up “and we can also use this for windows”.
No new games are coming to mac
They are always stretched thin on the engineering side of things, so mac issues do get deprioritized A LOT

Of course, with any buyout, everything is still uncertain and maybe when new management comes all those barriers will become crumble if MS fosters a more inclusive approach than activision did. However, i’m not holding breath on it.

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So it’s just FUD, disinformation, spam. The same thing as next gen GPU “leaks”.

But I do have popcorn to see 10.0 with no macOS or long time broken mac support but fully working WoA. It will be fun to read media coverage and forum posts, all those salty Mac Studio owners… Just make 10.0 with ton of “retention metrics” and player housing with cash shop only so it would be worse than SL on launch and we can all cheer as there will be a chance for incompetent people to finally get fired.

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Who said 10.0 wouldn’t have mac support? it’s not going to have drastic changes from current code.

it’s just going to be more of the same is all. I wouldn’t expect things to be better or worse, nor should users. I believe I’ve been pretty clear. You on other hand are the actual disinformation and spam. Def a plus 1 for block list since it’s clear you’re no longer worth any of my time.

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Just wanted to say thank you to you Omegal. You are a voice of reason which is appreciated. I would rather take your take on things than the cone of silence established by Blizzard.

I don’t expect Blizzard to magically change it’s stance on the Mac platform even under new management. In fact, I wholly expect it to get worse. That’s my common sense… but then you know what they say about common sense :wink:

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