I am experiencing the same issue on my 2019 MacBook Pro running MacOS Monterey version 12.0.1. The Battle.net app is prompting me to run as an administrator, which appears already to be the case. And World of Warcraft (Shadowlands, WoW Classic, and Burning Crusade Classic) won’t update correctly for the same reason. Other games seem to be updating normally.
Same issue, being asked to run as admin. Tried everything. It wont even let me scan and repair wow retail and classic. Downloaded diablo with no issue, so seems to be a game specific problem.
Specs: Macbook Pro 16" 2019 MacOS 11.4 - 16gb Ram - AMD Radeon Pro 5300m 4GB
2.6 GHz 6 core Intel Core i7
same here 
Cheers? Hardly any cheers here, let me tell ya. We’re no better off. Am NOT going into terminal to fix a software issue you need to fix and quickly.
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Battle net won’t accept my password to update itself. Help!!
what the heck are you talking about “Game Mode” i see nothing like that i dont even know where to find that at? please walkthrough, more specific breakdown of steps
nvm found it i think
well thats not causing the issue for me cuz that file or whatever has nothing added in it
@Konstance I have no clue what you just said but I am married to a retired storage person who talks Linux/Unix guy and all I can say is Blizzard’s issues not just this one. I feel like they can’t find long lasting solutions and suddenly users have to necro threads from the forums and or the internet/reddit etc to find solutions and its SMEs. I’m like how do we get here? I asked my husband should I type this command here and there and he is like don’t do unless it’s a Blue because there might be naughty people who suggests malicious commands 
I have seen that in some threads and fortunately the community polices itself.
This is egregious to think that Blizzard does not think this is a critical issue if the problem is recurring and ongoing. There should have been a solution.
And to those who would say “go get out and have some sun” what if there are handicapped people out there who have no options? and is beside the point of a company troubleshooting a known problem.
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Getting the same thing here
same problem on my Mac os 11.6
I am experiencing the same issue. I’m on a 2019 iMac running OS X 10.15.7 (Catalina).
Every time I open BattleNet I get the “Agent wants to make changes” message, put in my password and it does nothing. WoW and Classic BC won’t update or repair. WarCraft 3 does its own update check and has no issues. None of my other Blizzard games seem to have updates to be affected by this.
any estimated time or day?
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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.
Thank you. As a PC and Mac owner, I would like to report my Mac has been doing this for months. Could that please be looked at as well?
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.
appears to be fixed but not counting my chickens yet
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.
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| System Version:|macOS 11.6 (20G165)|
| Kernel Version:|Darwin 20.6.0|
| Model Name: | iMac |
|---|---|
| Model Identifier: | iMac17,1 |
| Processor Name: | Quad-Core Intel Core i7 |
| Processor Speed: | 4 GHz |
| Number of Processors: | 1 |
| Total Number of Cores: | 4 |
| L2 Cache (per Core): | 256 KB |
| L3 Cache: | 8 MB |
| Hyper-Threading Technology: | Enabled |
| Memory: | 32 GB |
| System Firmware Version: | 429.120.4.0.0 |
| SMC Version (system): | 2.34f3 |
Running the chmod command didn’t fix it.
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.