If the above does not fix it for you. Then here’s a copy paste of a post I’ve made elsewhere:
I know I’m a little late to the game here but seeing as this is still a recurring issue among Mac users, I thought I’d share my solution.
Now, before I get to the solution I’ll give some context that way I can be as helpful as possible.
First, this was tried on both an intel (my MacBook Pro) and an Apple silicon (girlfriend’s MacBook Air) Mac product. It worked for both.
Second, the terminal command will vary depending on the location of your world of Warcraft and battle.net install. Both my girlfriend and I have the entirety of the game and launcher on an external hard drive, which made it a lot easier.
The issue is coming from permissions structure in Unix type operating systems, so if for some reason you’re having this problem on Linux as well then this should work. (That claim is conjecture as I haven’t attempted this on any Linux distros).
The problem with trying to fix the permissions of your “World of Warcraft” folder by itself is that it does not appear that changing the single directory’s permissions does so recursively. Meaning that when you change the permissions of that folder itself, it does not also apply to everything INSIDE of that folder. You can check this yourself by command-clicking or “right” clicking on the folder and selecting “get info”, then at the bottom, expanding the sharing and permissions and then changing all options to “read & write”. After that, go into the folder and repeat the process for another folder. You should be able to observe that folders inside of the “World of Warcraft” folder (like retail, data, etc) still require a change.
Now you could do it manually by yourself, but that would be a painstaking process for every time that you want to play wow and this problem happens. Instead, press command+space and type terminal. Open the terminal app and place the following command in the terminal:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o+rwX /“path to your world of Warcraft folder”/*
Obviously, replace the path name to your wow folder.
Lastly, I’m not sure if this is required of the battle.net launcher as well and the reason being is that I applied this to the entirety of our external hard drives. Therefore, if applying these changes does not work for you then you may need to move your battle.net launcher app **and ** world of Warcraft folder into their own directory and repeat the command for that directory path.
If you want to apply it to an external hard drive like I did with ours’, then modify the command to be as follows:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX,g+rwX,o+rwX /Volumes/“name of your external hard drive”/*
One final note is that this is clearly an Apple / Macintosh security feature and that there is not much I can think of that blizzard can do to fix the issue right now. I’m sure there’s some things that they could do, but it requires more work than the average keyboard warrior here probably thinks.
Hope this helps.
If it does help you, please upvote this reply so that others can more easily find it.
