This only just happened in the last few days, but when trying to launch WoW or when the game is trying to load things it stops responding and I often have to wait a great deal of time before it will go through.
First issue is when launching the game. As soon as it tries to connect to the servers, the game becomes unresponsive for a bit. Sometimes I can’t even log in because it takes so long being unresponsive that the server kicks me out. Then it becomes unresponsive again when loading the character menu, and again when I try to load a character. It also takes a long time to connect to the servers, and often boots me back out to the beginning.
Once I’m in the game, however, things seem to work a lot smoother. However, it still freezes up for a bit when entering areas that require additional loading. There’s one spot when heading to the ringing deeps via flight path that always had a short load screen for me as I went through it, and now when flying through there on my own it freezes up for about 10-15 seconds. Additionally, there have been times in delves where the game would freeze up for almost 10 seconds, though I’m not sure what the trigger is for that.
I’m willing to believe this could be an anti-virus software issue as I just upgraded my system with Norton Antivirus, but the problem with that is I disabled the smartwall and auto-protect as a test and the problem still persists. Not sure what other settings I’d change to get it working again…
I doubt it’s a computer issue either as I just got this computer 6 months ago and it has more than enough memory to handle WoW… plus it had done so quite well for the entire time I’ve had it. It also handles other MMO’s like FF14 just fine, as well as more graphically intensive games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring. I did have some similar issues with Sea of Thieves, but was recommended there to turn down the max FPS setting, which seems to have worked. However, same changes made to WoW have not yielded any better results.
Also, just re-installed the game from scratch and it still seizes up on the first screen which is only telling me to ‘click any button to continue’… then it remains frozen on the first image of the cinematic while the sound plays around it, which also freezes about 20 seconds in.
If anybody has suggestions on what could be wrong, or what kind of settings I’d need to change on WoW/Norton, that would be fantastic. I’ve been stuck on the loading screen the entire time I’ve been writing this post…