Turn off Automatic Updates in your Battlenet Game Settings Options.
You won’t get the green ring… you can still manually download the updates… it just won’t try to install them while you are in game.
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The circle returns.
Automatic updates are turned off. Tried running the scan & repair tool also. If it means anything, I did just move WoW over to a new ssd recently.
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can we get a blue post on this issue? It’s d riving me crazy
I’ve been having this issue since early September, maybe late August. I didn’t experience any lag or issues with the download icon being at the top of my screen, but it WAS annoying. Just staying on a constant 0% and having no other downloads available in the battle.net client.
I was hoping we’d get an update or a resolve to this but… Oh well. Thanks to everyone who suggested possible fixes above, I’m gonna try them out!
I was having this same issue for weeks, just as everyone in this thread has reported.
As I am lazy and didn’t want to uninstall/reinstall after a scan/repair didn’t work, I wound up just using the addon MoveAnything to hide the element (or just move it to the corner). Not the best solution, but it gets it out of your way and lets you continue being lazy like myself! 
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That’s not a bad idea tbh 
At least until we get a blue post on how to fix it.
Just wanted to add I too am experiencing said issue. It’s annoying for sure, but not gamebreaking…yet. I’ve had it since I had downloaded the prepatch (so back in 8.3 as well) and just figured it would go away once the prepatch went to live.
It seems to come and go at random, and happens on all characters across all realms.
After 1-2 weeks, I’m happy to report that uninstalling and removing all WoW folders and then reinstalling retail fixed the issue for me. I was also able to back up my WTF and Addons folders and put them in place in the new install without the circle returning.
So, I wanted to give it a few weeks at least before posting just to make sure it didn’t come back. As many here have said, the only fix currently is a complete uninstall. Make sure you go in your program folders and go to WoW and completely remove all folders. Also, make sure you back up your addons and WTF folders so you can bring them back in after you do a fresh install. I did that, did a fresh install and disabled the auto update thing and no green circle now since I did that. I did that about 2 weeks ago.
Hi everyone,
for quite some time I was having this weird bug, but since I couldnt afford to buy BFA nor Shadowlands, I simply put forgot about it as I did not play WOW.
Now that BFA was given out for free and I entered shadowlands Beta, I was so annoyed by this bug, that I decided to fix it. It took me 20 minutes to find out why and how it can fixed.
If you follow the steps below, you should be able to have a working game again, without having to download 60GB or something. Maybe my results will also help the Blizzard employees to roll out a hotfix for everyone.
1. Introduction
For starters, WOW has various data files that host all kinds of information the game needs. Look at them as some kind of database with sounds, graphics and so on. These files need some kind of index to be accessed quickly by the game client. Look at it as some kind of library, without an index (search engine / libarian) you would search the library for years and maybe never find the book your looking for even though its there, somewhere.
WOW´s file storage system works the same. Whenever a patch is applied, all those little files receive new data, based on what Blizzard changed. Obviously, these files are receiving their biggest updates during pre patches or when major overhauls happen, but even in between Blizzard might alter certain things. Each time a file is altered, the Index has to be updated as well, so that new entries will be added to the index, so that the game finds out where they are. As more often this happens, as more likely it is that the index becomes corrupt, especially if you crash or abort the process by logging into the game, because it says “playable”.
Again the example with the library, many new books are added day in and day out, the libarian is adding, removing and changing books at the index, lots of chances to make an error and errors will add up corrupting the index more and more.
The result will be, that the game client struggles finding the necessary information quickly and as a workaround Blizzard added the background downloader, so that you can still play, even if information is missing or it would take too long, to find the information by searching through the data files on your computer “manually”.
To put it simple, stuff is hard to find but the game wont tell you “sorry, I messed up my index, please redownload”, instead it will just grab the sounds, graphics from the Blizzard servers, so that you can play, resulting in a massive lagspike and the green / yellow icon we see.
Since the index is corrupt, the game can download and download but will always lose the location of the data again, which leads to a neverending process and a game that becomes slower and slower as more and more data is missing.
2. Am I effected?
You can find out if you are affected by the follwing signs.
- using the launcher will show a little progress bar (indexing) each time you log in
- small second bar below the big bar during zone changes / logging into the game (indicating that files are downloaded during loading screen)
- green / yellow symbol during play in the middle of your screen
- long load times when you take the ship, the red dots on the map are drawn super slowly, videos are stuttering, voice lines are missing or delayed (changing expansions, introduction quests, scenarios are lagging)
3. How to fix it?
The process is quite simple, no major IT knowledge necessary, but of course I can not take responsibility if it wont work or messes up your WOW even further.
- 3.1 Step 1
At the Blizzard launcher, disable automatic updates by clicking the tiny wheel and choosing settings. Close the launcher, your game should also be closed just incase you had it open.
- 3.2. Step 2
Locate your WOW folder and search for Data. Inside the Data folder, you will find files with the extension of .IDX
You should notice now, that these files are just a few MB in size, while having been altered within the last few minutes / hours, matching your last gaming sessions.
Those are the corrupt index files, which no longer allow the client to communicate with your data files in the way it was supposed to happen.
Select all .idx files and either delete them or move them to a seperate folder.
- 3.3. Step 3
Since you are not an IT expert and messing with Blizzard files could lead to a ban, we must ask the game to recreate those index files for us. To do so we will now open the launcher and click the little wheel while having World of Warcraft selected.
Choose “scan & repair”
- 3.4. Step 4
You now need to wait for the game to scan your files. It will start to realize that there is no working index, so that it will recreate all the index files based on what Data you already have and while doing so, download all the missing data from Blizzard servers. In my case, it was a 5 GB download, yours can be bigger or smaller.
Thats the same result that you get by removing all WOW files, of course my version is quicker and less taxing on your bandwith as we target only the corrupt index and with it, download only the files that we currently dont have / are not to be found on our PC.
4. Result
You should now be able to play the game, without background downloads caused by corrupted index files. Keep “automatic downloads” at the launcher disabled until the hotfix arrives, else you might need to do the same index fix again.
I hope it will work for you, as it worked for me. I would say “see you all at Shadowlands” but I got no money for that, so maybe I will see you at BFA? Kudos and have a nice day!
P.S. I play on EU, but wanted to post the fix at the official forums since it might get more attention here by the Devs.
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I know you posted this about 10 days ago, but I just now noticed there was a new reply on this thread. Sucks for me and others that already did the old fix and had to (in my case) spend extra money for date to re download the whole game. However, thankful you came up with a great fix for anyone else having this issue. You broke it down great and made everything very simple and easy to understand. Thank you so much for taking the time to post this. Heres to hoping blizz sees your response and gets some type of hotfix for it.
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100% Upvote worked for me. Sad that some rando knows how to fix blizzards client than blizzard.
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I tried this but just as it was about to finish the scan and repair I get this error message:
Whoops! Looks like something broke. Give it another shot.
Error Code: BLZBNTAGT00000BB8*
It did manage to install a WoW icon on my desktop (doesn’t pull up the game though), but in Bnet launcher the “play” button is stuck as “Update” which clicking on only runs the scan and repair again. Each time that ends in the same error message…
I am sorry it didnt work out yet.
It could be that the patching process doesnt have permission to read / write a certain file / folder.
You could try to reboot the PC and then start the launcher as admin. In case you are having an AMD card, try an older driver as the last driver release does have a bug that can cause issues with WOW.
any news? this is still an issue <3
This happens to me all the time, too.
Thanks for the tips, but what (at least up until now, knocks on wood) worked for me was to also delete all files in the Data>data folder. I.e. not just the ones ending in .IDX. The only exception being other folders within the Data>data folder. Once I booted the launcher back up after that it actually started the update download automatically without me doing a scan and repair first. Have yet had an issue since, but wanted to get some game time in before replying here.
Nothing new to report from the Battle.net or WoW team on this issue. The underlying cause was corrupt game data which required WoW to stream data from the server instead of reading it from the local drive. Several fixes were implemented on the Battle.net side that would help prevent the game install from getting into this state again, but the fix was not retroactive.
If you’re still running into the issue then the best recommended fix is to uninstall and reinstall the game fully. This will reorganize the data files (correcting any corruption) and may actually shrink the size of the install a bit.