Started about a week or so ago, but now whenever I load a character, there is a 50% chance that its just stuck at the loading screen. The bar fills, but then it just stays there. I have to force quit the game, and then keep trying until eventually it’ll work. Is this a known problem?
If your not using an ssd I do highly recommend one. Also it may not hurt to make sure that your network is working the way it is suppose to be. Also what kind of Mac are you running and what OS version.
iMac, latest macOS.
SSD.
Wired connection. Played wow 2 years. Never had loading problems. Until last week.
I’ve had similar experiences, although its been more than a week for me. (Although it has gotten worse recently.) The loading bar will fill, but then it will hang a bit, with a spinning beach ball. I’ve only had one time where it didn’t eventually load. (And that time was weird, because eventually I could hear that I was game, but the loading screen was still up.)
It may or may not be related, but I’ve also had some issues where I disconnect once I load into game. I can log right back in, so it doesn’t feel like a network issue. (And it only seems to happen right after I load in.)
I should note that I haven’t ruled out addon/UI issues. (I’m due for a good old UI reset, but I’ve been experimenting with my UI so have been holding off on it.)
Late 2014 5k iMac
10.15.7
SSD (only about a year old)
AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4 GB
We have had issues with the apfs file system, is there anyway you get wow onto a MacOS extended volume? Again on an ssd.
What you describe is very close to what I have. Sometimes the bar would hang, the loading screen still there but I would hear in game sounds.
I mean I haven’t waited for a long time. I usually give up after like 3 minutes. Maybe it’ll eventually load? But it’s still a bug.
do to how bad casc is, the data loading gets slower more and more over time. I literally just did a clean data rebuild this week to speed loading back up. YES on an SSD. in fact an ultra fast NVMe drive. But casc becomes severely fragmented ver time, ESPECIALLY because of fake patching bug mac has. every patch is just a little more fragmentation to casc.
The fix, delete the data folder when wow isn’t running. then hit update. It’ll redownload/rebuild fresh data that’s not fragented.
“but it’s an SSD, they don’t get fragmented”. yes and no. it’s fragmented becuase casc data is heavily compressed, and files are scattered across a few dozen compressed archives. When data is fresh though this data is sequencial. however over time the data becomes scattered across the archives so even on an SSD random read time and unpacking dozens of archives to find scattered files has serious slowdown.
does that delete any of my addon settings?
Also, why would trying it 3 times, eventually go through then?
Your addons are stored in:
World of Warcraft/_retail_/Interface/AddOns
Your addon settings (along with other configurations) are stored in
World of Warcraft/_retail_/WTF
I would suggest backing up both the AddOn and WTF folders, but if you just delete the Data folder as Omegal is suggesting (which is in the parent folder before retail), then everything should remain intact. The Data folder only contains the WoW game data and assets and is easily recreated by downloading it again.
Just delete
World of Warcraft/Data
and let the Battle.net Launcher recreate it.
I don’t think it will help with this issue. When I experienced this issue, it wasn’t trying to load anything from the drive anymore, but seemed to be an issue with the client-server communication. Something got dropped and the load could never complete (quitting the game, waiting a couple of minutes and trying again would load almost instantly). Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to recreate the folder every now and then.
I haven’t seen it happen in a couple of weeks now, but you’re definitely not alone.
I changed the file system on my ssd and I don’t get the phantom patches anymore, perhaps a wierd permission associated with a certain file system?