No ETA just yet! Though I can say it’s a high priority issue so hopefully we will see some progress on it soon.
Players should still be able to open the game by bypassing the launcher if it’s updated enough to connect online. Players who are not updated may see red (incompatible) realms when logging in. To login manually:
In the launcher, click the gear icon next to the play/update button then select show in explorer.
Open the folder game version you’re wanting to play
Double click (or right-click and run) the wow executable (it will say application under type)
Login manually since we bypassed the app
Note, the above instructions are for Windows users. We have instructions set up for Mac users on this thread.
try this to see if the game updates…open task manger look for WowVoiceProxy.exe (it is a useless processes if you don’t use the voice chat) right click it and end task ---- because this may cause the updates to fail.
Mkay, finally success. I did a few things at once this time, though, so who knows which one did the trick? MacOS 10.14.6, btw. Mind you I keep hidden files visible in my admin account and several of these items I deleted were hidden.
Copied the retail Interface and WTF directories under a different name elsewhere on the drive
Deleted the same files and directories as previous attempts
a. ~/Applications/Battle.net.app
b. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft Launcher.app
c. Computer/Users/Shared/Battle.net
d. ~/Library/Application Support/Battle.net
Deleted these additional files and directories
a. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/_classic_
b. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft//.build.info
c. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_/.patch.result
d. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_/.product.db
e. ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_/Launcher.db
f. Computer/Users/Shared/Blizzard
g. ~/Library/Application Support/Blizzard
h. Any files last modified prior to 2018 in ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/
i. Any files last modified prior to 2018 in ~/Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_
Then I deleted a few items in the directory of the only Blizzard game remaining on my computer, which is Diablo 3.
a. ~/Applications/Diablo III/.product.db
b. ~/Applications/Diablo III/Launcher.db
c. if it existed, anything called battle.net in this directory
Established a Games folder (subdirectory of Applications)
a. Created a NEW directory: ~/Applications/Games
b. Created a NEW directory: ~/Applications/Games/World of Warcraft
c. Dragged all the contents from the original World of Warcraft directory in ~/Applications/World of Warcraft to the new ~/Applications/Games/World of Warcraft
d. Dragged all my other games from the Applications folder to the new Games folder, as well, including Diablo III
e. Changed permissions of ~/Applications/Games to permit read and write for admin, which oddly only root had upon the creation of this new directory.
f. Deleted now-empty directory ~/Applications/World of Warcraft
Finally, I double clicked on Diablo III.app, which of course proceeded to generate a new copy of Battle.net.app in the same Diablo III directory (which I’ll move up a directory later). It required I confirmation of the D3 location and otherwise launched D3 normally, which I played for short awhile cuz, what the heck.
Meanwhile the Battle.net.app could not find nor acknowledge the location I specified to find World of Warcraft, which I expected since I’d deleted the look-up files Battle.net.app needed. So the button, instead of ‘Play’ or ‘Update’ said ‘Install’. I clicked ‘Install’ and it allowed for the install location, which I changed to ~/Applications/Games/World of Warcraft, the new location of the existing installed copy of the game. Progress bar for a couple of minutes, then almost ten minutes of reclaiming more than 5 GB disk space. The button changed to play, I launched normally, and even have all my settings and addons intact.
I can’t identify all the individual files I deleted because I didn’t screenshot as I should have. Presumably they were only artifacts since everything now looks and plays fine and the files I expected to be regenerated did so.
Naturally it’s the one time I performed more than one or two deletions that I finally got things to work. Hopefully this long post will help some players and devs will have learned something useful about where the bug or corruption lay.
This problem just cropped up for me. I tried starting without the launcher, but that didn’t work at all. I got a long error message, but I couldn’t copy it and it didn’t have any sort of error ID. (It just was titled “World of Warcraft” and listed a bunch of what looks like gibberish to me, a mostly computer illiterate layperson.)
Your husband is correct, following random instructions from The Internet is not generally advised. I offer my post with an explanation of why the permissions error happen to try an alleviate some of the concern/trepidation.
This is what my Data folder looked like from the command line:
drw-rw-rw- 23 dennisw admin 782 15 Dec 2016 Data
the lack of the ‘x’ prevent access to the file names inside the folder as as per the Linux/Unix/POSIX standards. This is what it looked like after I ran my posted “find and exec” command:
drwxrwxr-x 23 dennisw admin 782 15 Dec 2016 Data
Yes, Blizzard/Battle.net App team needs to fix this and the whole 777 (or drwxrwxrwx) thing is super terrible for security… and none of the other games do that… so that is a pretty epic fail there.
I offer something to try and help but it is up to people to understand make the informed choices… I manage Unix/Linux as a career but the decision is up to the doer at the end.
Good Luck
P.S. one would hope someone at Blizzard sees this info and it helps to inform them of where to look too.
OK I am in. This is what my husband did. He said this in tech talk so bear with me.
He went back to my Time Machine and compared my files from 3-4 days to today and said my Data settings were changed. My permissions were changed to read only that’s why the Updates got hang. I don’t think this is in the Security > Accessibility settings because I tried this option myself and that did not work. He went to Data folders and changed it read and write.
Then when he logged me onto the battlenet app he said select “Reveal in Finder” and launch WoW that way vs the clicking Update or Play (which kept hanging me). It worked for me - and I am in.
I’m having the same problem, all WoW games try to update and then they go into a scan and repair cycle which fails and then right back to update. This is maddening. Can’t play any WoW games. Even trying to launch them without using the Battle.net App fails.
Update: I attempted to uninstall the game from Windows, but it said I can only uninstall from the launcher. So I tried uninstalling from the launcher. I kept running into a loop where it said I can’t uninstall retail because Classic is doing an update. I can’t uninstall Classic because Classic BC is doing an update. I can’t uninstall Classic BC because retail is doing an update.
I just kept cycling through and clicking until one of them started an uninstall. Then I was able to uninstall all the games. Or at least, it said it was uninstalling. When I tried to reinstall, nothing would install. BUT, when I looked on my drive, I saw that all the original files and folders were still there. Nothing had truly been uninstalled.
My sister suggested I try downloading directly from the website. So I attempted that, but it just started up the launcher and put me back in the infinite update loop. Even when I try to start the game by bypassing the launcher and using the executable file, nothing happens. At this point, I can think of nothing else to try. This is a problem that needs to be fixed on Blizzard’s end.
Another 1 here who hasn’t been able to get on for 2 days now. On a Mac running Monterey getting the same Please try again after logging on as an administrator. and error message BLZBNTAGT00000841. I tried all the fixes suggested by Blizz plus a cpl on here but nothing has worked. It’s getting a bit beyond a joke, hopefully Blizzard gets this issue fixed soon.
I made a comment in a different post but just wanted to add my name to the list. Win 10 system, I had not been subbed for a long time so my updates were paused and then when I resubbed I got in this loop. I can still play the game however and it is updated, but I keep getting notifications of updates being applied.
Mac. 11.6.1. I uninstalled from the launcher and re-installed the game. I can play and the update stall is gone.
However, it meant losing all my add-on settings.
The game is now playing from the World of Warcraft Beta/retail folder. It will not play from the original World of Warcraft/retail folder.
I found that this was also the case for me on my Mac. The privileges on the Data directory were completely wrong. I am a unix person so I know how to fix it, but this is not an error I would recommend a non-technical person fix.
100% Blizzard error since I would never normally look at these files.
I think it’s important to stress that even though some of us have found various workarounds they are not consistently working for everyone.
More importantly, we are still part of the crowd of players looking to blizzard for a permanent solution. As has been said by many, the launcher needs to be fixed so that future patches & updates will be accessible.