First, Battle.net setup doesn’t work. It gets stuck halfway through, fails, and then crashes the entire OS after I click the “close” button after the installer reports the failure. WoW itself, after being copied from another machine, throws an error about not being able to create a folder at “…/Data” and then closes.
If I had to guess, both issues may stem from the filesystem shuffle that came with Catalina implementing a hard separation of the system and user data by means of APFS volumes with the OS residing on a read-only volume and user data residing on a read-write volume. It’s not easily seen when running Catalina, but if you boot back into Mojave after installing Catalina on a second partition, the two volumes are clearly visible with the system partition being named whatever you originally named the volume and the data volume taking that name and appending “-Data”, e.g. a volume with Catalina installed originally named “Stormwind” gets split into “Stormwind” and “Stormwind-Data”.
Thanks for the info! We’ll keep track of this though its not something we as support will be able to assist with as it is currently a beta operating system. If you’re looking to play the game for the time being, we do recommend going back to the latest stable build of MacOS.
Normally this would be an acceptable response as it IS beta, however they have introduced two major changes that will need addressing before they go live in September.
32bit is gone, completely. Anything that was 32bit (Installer, Launcher, anything) will NOT work in macOS Catalina.
The filesystem changes are not being eased in either, its happening and there is no way to stop it.
I’d urge Blizzard to spend a few days looking into a solution this time instead of telling us it is Beta…
I wanted to renew the initial post’s inquiry. I understand completely the initial response with developer release 1, and the response from 2 weeks ago.
That’s a pretty unfair question to ask support folks any time. There might not be a locked door (as, say, for many projects at Apple) between them and the devs, but next-OS-version support is really not something to ask Support about. Better to find the next “Ask the devs” session and throw that at them. Lots of us are concerned about the answer.
Support can forward the question on to the devs, and the devs can talk to support. It is something I am surprised was not fixed earlier…as in the launcher not being 64bit? Or the installer not being 64bit? The client is 64bit…why not the rest?
most support is actually in TX with exception of senior support in CA, most devs are in CA.
So it’s not so much open door as you think. That aside. 8.2 was in pipeline long before beta of catalina came out. It’s likely blizz already has changes in pipe but they weren’t checked into 8.2 branch because it wouldn’t make sense to tamper with something you are trying to stabilize and get out the door. experimental code for a BETA OS would go into the upcoming branch, not the the one about to ship. That’s just coding logic. I’d expect to hear more news on it with 8.2.5 whenever it hits PTR at a future time
Thanks for all the reports! While we cannot provide troubleshooting for beta OS versions we do appreciate our fans reporting these types of problems.
Rest assured our engineers do communicate with Apple frequently on these types of things. Please feel free to continue submitting bug reports for the beta OS. Just bare in mind technical support may not be able to address these reports. We can only track the reports and send them to our engineers. Bug fixes can only be done through patches to the operating system beta or game.
I had the same issues with the client and catalina. While the next beta was fixing one of the critical issues, there where still massiv freezes after entering a zone.
Back in Legion when Metal was introduced, the game performance was very bad and I did reduce the render scaling to 50% as remedy. After turning the render scale back to 100% and Reconstructionquality back of off the client has no issues. Actually it runs now way more better as in Legion.
It would make sense if we all share our graphic settings and Mac Models we use to compare the best settings.
Im running WoW on a iMac 27", 16GB Ram, Fusion Drive with a AMD Radeon R9 M395X 4 GB
Just wanted to give you an update, I did some testing and upgrading from Mojave to Catalina with the BattleNet app already installed allows the game and game updates to work. It’s just installing the BattleNet app itself on Catalina that fails.
That’s interesting. I guess this means that without some kind of change, binaries downloaded/installed by third party systems under Catalina (such as the bnet installer) automatically have execute permissions stripped?
I can see the logic there (might help stymie certain types of malware) but that’s gonna break a number of things if true.
I just copied my battle.net application from another computer to the Catalina one and opened it. Blizzard have done a good enough job at that app to make it install whatever is missing if you copy it across. Works like a charm
Thank you for your continued reports. I’ve got word from our engineers that they have pushed a fix for permissions issues with the new OS beta and the Blizzard Battle net app.
Please continue reporting here if the issue continues or is resolved.