I’ve been around WoW since 2006 but haven’t played any WoW since Classic was launched some years back. Back then it was on a 2019 MacBook Pro which of course is Intel-based. I used an eGPU with that system and it was great.
These days my every-day machine is a 2022 Mac Studio of the M1 Max variety with 64GB mem. I’m trying to get a new install of Classic on this system and it’s simply not happening and I have no clue how to attack this.
I have not re-activcated my WoW subscription yet, but this shouldn’t matter if I’m not mistaken. I should still be able to install the product and then fork over the $$$ once I can confirm the app even launches.
I started with a clean Battle.net client installation and won’t speak about my amazement that this is still not native to Apple Silicon.
With Activity Monitor open and sorted by “kind” so I can see the Intel apps (which are only Blizzard’s – literally everything else I use is native), I initiate the Classic WoW game installation. What this also means is that I just installed Rosetta 2 today; I’ve managed to avoid Rosetta entirely to this point.
I see a few more “Agents” added to the process list, all sitting at 100% CPU and doing nothing very useful apparently.
In the BNET client it states “Initializing…” for a while before the blue button there becomes interactive again and is labeled “Update”. I click that button.
Seemingly more Agent processes get added to the list, all pegged at 100% CPU, making this machine crawl in ways I have never seen it crawl before.
I close out the BNET app, and just as I always remembered it leaves some processes behind, still sitting at 100%. I had to kill this from Activity Monitor.
I tried wiping the BNET app and all Blizzard from this system, including all preferences etc below ~/Library/, and re-installing BNET app and trying the whole process again – same result. This thing just collapses on itself trying to download this 20-yr-old 4GB game.
To be clear, this is a completely clean installation. When I first got this Mac Studio last year it was set up as “new” with no files restored from my old system. This box has not had any Blizzard stuff installed ever, till the attempts made today.
This is on Ventura 13.4 BTW. I use this machine daily for my job and everything else, for which it has been pretty solid.
Anybody run into this before and have any specific advice? Thanks in advance.
This seems to be an issue with all macs right now. I have tried to download both wow classic and retail on multiple macs the past two days with 0 success and the exact same issues as you coming up. Hopefully Blizzard notices this and works on it soon. I just sent a ticket for the same issue.
Thanks for the reply, my friend, and I definitely agree – I hope they pick up on it. I’ll definitely get a ticket submitted, too. EDIT: just submitted a ticket now.
EDIT again: I see this was mentioned over in the EU forums as well.
It’s worth peeking at the agent logs which I believe were in ~/Library/Application Support/Battle.net/Logs/ and looking for the error lines (lines prefixed with "E "). They aren’t super telling my there’s chatter about error 5007, agent restart limit being hit, etc etc.
I’m trying to install WoW (retail) and running into the same problem on a new Mac Studio (M2 Max). When I click “Install”, it spends a long time initializing, and eventually the “Install” button changes to “Update”. Clicking “Update” just gives a useless “whoops!” error every time. I guess we’re stuck until Blizzard gets around to fixing their broken installer.
Exact same issue I have both for wow retail and wow classic on my m1 Mac mini. It just happened two days ago. I guess there are some issues related to Blizzard’s wow server, which agent cannot download the game
Someone in the EU thread (linked earlier in this thread) said giving full disk access to Agent works. That’s in System Settings → Privacy and Security. I’ll give it a try and report back.
Try giving Agent full disk access in System Settings → Privacy and Security. Agent isn’t visible in the Applications folder, but you should be able to search for it.
I went into privacy settings and granted both “full disk access” and “app management” to both battle.net and agent. Like you said, I had to search for agent.
Before doing this, I even went through and erased all leftover file related to both bnet and WoW. I did a fresh install of battle.net and then updated the privacy settings.
After that, I opened Bnet and tried installing, but got the same result. Long “initializing” followed by an update button that leads to a “whoops” error.
I opened my activity monitor and there were five different instances of “agent” running and taking up five cores of my CPU, and I had to manually stop those within activity monitor.
Yeah, same thing here. I completely removed Battle.net, restarted, reinstalled it, made sure Battle.net and Agent both have full disk access, then tried again. Same result. I notice when it’s initializing, it downloads about 80 / 660 MB of the initial data it needs before installation can start, and that’s when the “Install” button changes to “Update”. Once that happens I know it’s not going to work.
I’m now just copying the entire World of Warcraft folder over from my previous machine (fortunately it has the “Universal” version of the app even though it’s an Intel Mac). Maybe with the app already installed it will at least be able to apply updates.
I got the game working by just copying the World of Warcraft folder from my previous Mac. Game updates are working fine in Battle.net. It’s just the initial install that’s failing.
It’s now running natively (ARM build) on my Mac Studio (M2 Max).
As a bonus, all my addons and configuration came along for the ride, so everything is exactly the way I had it on my iMac.
Interestingly, I just tried installing Diablo 3 and it worked fine (and the game runs perfectly). Maybe it’s just WoW that can’t be installed from scratch right now. Hope it gets fixed soon.
Thanks everyone for banging on this. It’s unfortunate we’re still in a non-working state with WoW on these Macs. I personally haven’t tried again since submitting a Support ticket to Blizzard. They haven’t yet provided any feedback on the ticket yet. If I get a working solution from them I’ll definitely post that here as well.
I got a ticket response but it wasn’t super helpful they just suggested turning off FileVault and re-installing battle.net. Neither of which worked. They really need to know this is not an individual mac problem and that a lot of mac users are dealing with this so the issue has to be on their side.