Hi I’ve been looking everywhere on forums and the internet to try see what I can do to sort it my pc is three months old I’ve been playing wow fine since the patch - but since the reset on wed I can’t get in , I’m running Windows 10 with bitdefender . If my Mac can download the patch ok and the latest reset update why can’t my pc , I could get on the day before the reset no problem but after the reset it’s been stuck on downloading manifest , I really think blizzard just don’t care , they have ur money in subs and that’s that
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Useful post, thanks. Agree with your list of potential causes. In particular anti-virus. For me all the usual exe are permitted in the firewall, and no I will not uninstall AV (as suggested by Blizzard’s own help)
Windows 10 x64
AV: Bitdefender
Wow been installed and updating on this machine for 3 years
Something else I’m looking at is the Secondary Log-on service that the agent requires. Is was off on mine, turning it on to see if it helps, For more info see: https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/7551
Edit *
Hmmm that’s 3 system with Bitdefender now.
I’m running through trying various Bitdefender things on and off to see if it is causing hassles. It’s very good at silently causing problems with games. Could be a red herring, but worth investigating.
Their advice to uninstall your antivirus software is completely ludicrous and potentially hazardous. Need to work around such issues.
I understand that temporarily uninstalling your security software is not a decision to make lightly, but it could determine whether this issue is caused by your security software or not.
An alternative would be to contact the developer of your security software, and ask them for further assistance with their software.
Have a few seconds to spare? Let me know how I’m doing!
A better alternative is if you could provide or point to an exhaustive list of apps that might be relevant that we could check the firewall settings for, e.g. agent.exe, battle.net.exe
I am a software engineer, with a lot of expertise in debugging this sort of issue. But it’s very hard for me to contact my antivirus developer and tell them they are blocking or interfering with a process erroneously when I do not have a good idea of what the process (Agent) is trying to do.
I can use (and am using) various pieces of diagnostic software to monitor what files and sockets it is opening and how they are failing, I can see the logs from Agent too. But that is no substitute for having the code in front of you and seeing what operations are failing. Your tool chain engineers will have to talk with Bitdefender about it. They are the only people who have the required information to do so.
I will keep looking at my end and trying things, I might get lucky by a process of elimination, but I may well not. Bitdefender is no small Antivirus, they have 8.5% of the market, that puts them in 5th place internationally. Will effect quite a lot of your customers.
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Minor update, having the Secondary Log-on service running made no difference.
The secondary logon does nothing I’ve also uninstalled other games , Logitech , twitch to ensure the pc has no distractions or any other downloads to do , I’m disgusted that a big company like blizzard can’t work this out , if I can play the game one day before the reset then the following day it all goes wrong and it’s stuck on the download manifest then someone technical their end must know how to sort it , my pc set up hasn’t changed , this latest wee update is the cause of me not being able to get into the game - blizzard please do something productive for your customers and give us a non scripted list of things to try (not just the scripted default list from your support pages)
“Waiting for another installation” I have this problem every time there is a patch. Am not computer savvy. What always worked for me - Log out of battle net, log in, click Update, see if it works, if it waits for another installation again, log out log in, Close battle net start again, I just try these things randomly, finally the update starts for real. Then I can play.
The Battle-net program is the UI you see that launches the Blizzard games and handles all the Friends chat stuff, amongst other things (News, Shop, etc).
With regard to updates, it has another program it talks to called Agent, which actually does the updates. Updates happen either automatically or via the limited commands you can give Battle-net (pause/resume/pause-all), with Battle-net asking the Agent to update a specific app or pause, etc. Agent responds to the commands and Battle-net shows you what it’s doing via the progress bar.
When it says “Waiting on another installation.” that means you’ve asked Battle-net to update that product, or it has decided it needs doing automatically, but Agent has another job to do and is busy with that. When it is working properly, that should mean it is updating another Blizzard app, be it Battle-net itself (you get a progress bar under the Blizzard logo top-left), that has happened today and yesterday, or another Blizzard game you have installed. However, when Agent is stuck, it may not respond to Battle-net, ie. not doing what Battle-net asked it to do, just as if it was busy doing something else and Battle-net will display “waiting on another installation”. In this case it is probably still trying to install the same thing from when it was asked to last time you opened Battle-net or asked it to start the install, but is not in a place where it is responsive to let Battle-net know where it’s at and show you the progress bar instead.
Agent.exe runs separately to Battle-net and can stay on whilst you open/close Battle-net. Usually if it’s able to, it shuts down within about 30s of closing Battle-net. If it is very stuck, it sometimes can’t do that and doesn’t stop what it is doing.
Hi Support, if possible could you please supply a list of URLs that might be used in the download and install of battle.net and Warcraft and I’ll trying plugging them into Bitdefender’s exception list. The ones I found on the Bitdefender forum do not help. Perhaps there are new ones.
Ideally Blizzard and Bitdefender could reach out to each other and get this sorted once and for all.
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I uninstalled wow completely and downloaded it in safe mode then booted it back up in normal mode it showed another update so I shut it down and done the update in safe mode - try it , it’s let me in the game - it’s been a bit laggy but I’m still trying to work out if bitdefender is the issue but I would boot up in safe mode and do the update coz let’s be honest blizzard just don’t care 
and they wonder why people leave the game
Problem I have, is when it’s stuck on downloading … manifest, it is actually constantly downloading something at full speed. My net connection still has a monthly bandwidth limit and just being stuck on that point alone managed to download about 90-100GB of god knows what this month already. Limit is 200GB for the month, which I am close to.
Downloading WoW for a full reinstall would be about 60GB, with no guarantee it would work. 60GB = £60 for me (that’s ~$75-80) if over limit, that’s about 5 months subscription fee. Who says I’ll only have to do it once? No, not worth so much money, I have other MMOs to play that can patch without messing up and causing days of headaches.
I’ve put a support request in to Bitdefender with a load of data. Maybe they will solve it. I do wonder if it’s a false positive for them, or Blizzard doing something bad. Or just a red herring and it being an unrelated issue. Whether or not I’ll ever find out is only to be guessed at.
Lamb, thank you, thank you, thank you, booting up in Safe Mode with Networking did the trick. I didn’t uninstall wow, just updated normally, so the update in Safe mode also works.
Obviously safe mode must stop all aspects of Bitdefender so the download could go ahead. Windows Defender kicks in so there is still a firewall in place, which is good.
Using Safe Mode is a much better option than uninstalling the anti-virus software. For starters when you boot normally the AV will be back in place. Blizzard support should update their advice to use this.
Not had a chance to play the game yet, but at least this first stage is over.
Thanks again for the suggestion.
I’m loathed to work around the problem, as it’ll probably persist every time there is an update and they’ll never fix it. They seem to much prefer answers of the form: download a petabyte of unnecessary garbage, spin around on your head in the nude for an hour whilst waving a censer around from your feet and then sacrifice a goat.
@ysbael Can’t u boot up in safe mode to update the patch ? Then boot up in normal mode although this has worked I’m getting lag for some reason so bitdefender is still messing with wow somehow my husband is trying to sort it now. But at least we know we have the latest patches on the system
Well I could, though it would take my computer out of action for hours whilst it patched the 16GB it needs. I use it for work constantly, so would be very unimpressed with that.
My point was rather that it is not a good nor sustainable practice to have to work around issues like this in a drastic way. They need to get it fixed. Workarounds just have the effect of giving them an excuse not to resolve problems.
I tried this but didn’t do much apart from making me dizzy and scaring the neighbours.
You are right though we shouldn’t have to use workarounds. Writing software is complicated, especially the size of wow, but it is never done in isolation, AV will be one of the known external considerations.
I’m a software engineer myself, I know what they would need to do in order to resolve this. It’s not something we can do for them, just supply necessary information so they can hunt it. The trouble with big companies like Blizzard, is they always keep developers away from the general public completely. That’s what the customer technical support staff are for, buffers to prevent millions of non-issues getting through to dev teams. It’s also why they mostly regurgitate stock answers to your problems, they are not generally developers and do not have the knowledge to resolve genuine bugs. Their task is to observe patterns and collect information. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough developers really, no games company does, and a big launch like this generates tons of bugs. If 95% of people are in-game, but have in-game bugs that are pissing them off, then they’ll prioritise fixing that. If the number of people who are really shut out of the game is small, it’s not financially worth their time to resolve the issue. Better to lose the customers than waste many developer hours trying to resolve it.
Hideous and I hate it, usually I refuse to work on those principles myself, but it is the common reality of modern development organised to the drum of marketing departments and accounts.
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Soooo, no real solution for this still??
I’ve had this problem since latest expansion… Heard it was bad so after trying everything suggested I just stopped paying for the crap.
And looks like you are right, they don’t care about helping us.
So sad when I’ve been playing since Beta, byebye WoW!