Hello, World of Warcraft used to work fine on my M1 Max Macbook Pro. One day updates failed, would get stuck and not progress. So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling battle.net but trying to install battle.net got stuck too.
I also have it installed on a desktop PC and handheld PC where it works fine.
I gave up on it for a while and uninstalled everything. Recently I wanted to be able to run WoW on my Macbook again because it’s mobile yet more powerful than my handheld. I left the installation to run for a long time, and turns out that if I let it run for a day and turn off screensaver, that eventually it gets past the various points where it mysteriously gets stuck, such as 45% in battle.net install and crawls during initializing part of applying an update for hours and then downloads quickly gigabytes of data so if I leave battle.net open over night eventually it installs and applies all updates to World of Warcraft.
However, after I do that, when I press Play, it says Launching for a few seconds and then nothing happens. I know that on my desktop PC this happens too but if I wait 1-2 minutes eventually World of Warcraft opens and I can play it fine. My desktop PC is pretty strong, Intel 12600, nVidia 4070. Performance once the game starts is fine, just takes it mysteriously a long time to start. However on my Macbook Pro, even 5 minutes later it doesn’t launch.
Sometimes when I press Play, it will change to Update and then I click Update and then it takes it several minutes to get past initializing to realize the game is up to date and the button turns back to Play. I press Play and then the same transition from Launching to Play happens without the game launching and no error message.
Again, on both my handheld and my desktop I am able to run the game no problem, except for the delay in launch on my desktop but at least it launches eventually. I have high speed fiber internet. My Macbook Pro is able to connect to the internet fine and connection speed is fairly fast, fiber connection. I don’t have any firewall software installed on any of my computers except anything that maybe comes pre-installed in the operating system nor did I block any IPs.
I tried to get tech support from Blizzard… the first response they sent me a generic tech support article for hearthstone even though the very first line in my submission mentioned this is an issue with World of Warcraft.
In the second response they sent me a generic article about internet connections though my connection is fine as far as I can tell and they marked it as resolved and said I could reopen it, but when I go to the ticket there is no button to reopen, only a survey button so I would have to open a new ticket and start all over when probably the person on the other side again won’t even read the first line of my ticket.
I found an old article from 2008 or 2009 talking about going into specific folders to delete everything battle.net, blizzard and World of Warcraft related after uninstall and I did that and then re-installed… again, it took an entire day for it to get past the various stuck points. Again, this is not a connection issue as far as I can tell, because once it gets past those stuck points it is able to download gigabytes of data very fast yet will get stuck on 500 megabytes for hours during “initializing” phase. Maybe there is some mystery firewall setting I am not aware of, but because 99 percent of the articles are for Windows, I have no idea what to look for in MacOS.
It doesn’t seem I am going to be getting any help from Blizzard, who in their very responses send me to the forums to try and get answers. The sheer obtuseness of not even noticing which game I was asking support for is mind boggling.
Any ideas on what else I can try that I didn’t already try?
Again, it’s fresh install after uninstall and manually deleting traces of battle.net, blizzard and world of warcraft (though the article was from 2009 so maybe out of date and I missed some folders?) and I restarted my computer and updated the operating system and the issue persists.