Potential solution for WoW crashing macs

Support Mac Technical Support
1

Like many here I’ve been struggling with WoW crashing my mac. It all started when WoW released a client for the new Apple chips. I have an Intel Mac Pro 2013 with D700 GPU’s. I tried everything I could think of with no luck. But I downloaded EtreCheck and learned that this was frequently causing system crashes:

World of Warcraft.app - High CPU Use (4 times)
        Executable: /Applications/World of Warcraft/_retail_/World of Warcraft.app

Dialing in a bit further it seems that a few system processes aggressively use CPU. For whatever reason the WoW app has really high spikes in system usage causing the rest of the computer to hang and eventually have a Kernel Panic. This would lead to rolling crashes as I booted up even.

As for the solution, it is rather simple. When launching WoW, instead of using the Battle.net launcher try this in Terminal instead:

nice -n 20 open /Applications/World\ of\ Warcraft/_retail_/World\ of\ Warcraft.app

For this to work you need to have WoW installed in the default location. Terminal can be found in the Utilities folder within /Applications. If your WoW install location is somewhere else then do:

nice -n 20 open /Path/To/WoW/App

Since starting to run WoW this way not only have I not experienced a single crash, but I have also seen my frame rates jump way up (from about 45ish to 85-120). I have also noticed that the game in general is much more responsive.

I’ll post again if I experience a crash in this way. Previously to the Apple Silicon update I don’t think this computer had ever crashed once, so it was quite the annoyance.

I hope this helps someone, please comment if you have any observations!

Edit, added preformatted text so that the retail folder is shown correctly

2

All that really does is place wow at highest cpu priority, when other stuff is trying to use CPU…

A better solution probably is to figure out what’s eating cpu in background in first place so you don’t have to tell macOS to basically “ignore it and give it all to wow” since it’d all be free.

In other words, I’d check what’s using cpu while wow is open (normally) and fix that. you can also enable an option in battle.net to exit when launching wow as well, so it’s not running in background, which may be more seemless to some than doing this…Or you can just launch wow directly from dock or app folder as well without using terminal to again bypass launcher/not have it running.

3

It’s the opposite, a nice rating of “20” is maximum niceness so it puts it at the lowest cpu priority

I suspect that because the rest of the computer’s tasks are no longer starved for CPU it allows WoW to in fact run better.

Edit oh I see, the maximum niceness is 19, so setting it to “20” is confusing because it caps out at 19. It still works, though

4

A niceness of -20 is the highest priority and 19 is the lowest priority

That’s way I understood it.

5

If the command were “nice -n -20” then it would set it to max priority

6

trying this, but when I get to the login screen I get a 51900314 error (We couldn’t verify your account with that information)… double checked account, password, authenticator etc, but won’t let me log in for some reason

1 Like
7

What happens when you launch WoW directly? (meaning if you browse into Applications → World of Warcraft → Retail and then click the app itself

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I ended up getting so tilted at the continuous issues that I just installed a windows partition with bootcamp and am running the game that way. Haven’t had a single crash, able to turn graphics settings back up and get my previous 100fps, everything running perfectly. Hope at some point they will address the issue on the mac side, but from speaking with support it seems its a combo of a bliz issue + an apple issue, pasted below part of a reply from a gm:

What you describe does very much align with what we’ve been looking into from our end. The issue definitely seems to be centered around how MacOS (erronously) interacts with specific display drivers, while handling the game - so the crashes becoming more frequent/prominent while the display rapidly updates seems absolutely plausible.

As matters stand this likely will need a two-pronged solution. We’ve been trying on our end to circumvent the handling bug in MacOS, by making the game avoid conditions where this’d be relevant as much as possible - but we’ve also reached out to Apple, to hash out an actual fix to the underlying bug on their side. The latter is still very much a work in progress, but soon as we have any viable solution we’ll be sure to make it well known.

9

Thanks for this info. This does seem to be an unfortunate problem. I am not having the same issue where launching WoW directly results in it asking for the authentication code which is then not accepted. So it looks like I’ll have to run WoW on windows as well now. Only problem there is I use the command key for a few macros and that doesn’t work on Windows. Ah well, thanks again

Edit: I am suddenly able to log again in without Battle.net