Adding the wow.exe and the wow folder to windows defender exclusion list fixed the issue for me.
Insane. Waited about 7 minutes from clicking play until it finally launched - only to frees on the loading characters screen… what the actual?
I fixed it by using “scan and repair” it is not grayed out when restarting pc.
Got a 64mb download, and also updated drivers. Not sure which thing fixed it.
For someone else switching to battlenet beta in the settings fixed the issue.
Acts like an early access game.
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Small indie company btw.
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I didn’t have any issues yesterday when I saw people talking about it
Had the issue earlier today and just waited and it started 5mins later. Then just tried launching again now and it was fine. Seems to be a bit tempramental so not sure if those scanning / repairing just hit lucky and maybe it didnt fix the issue
I have the same problem. The game takes long time to launch. It does launch though after a long wait. Please fix.
and again, the problem persists, Blizz this is seriously getting old, fix your game that we are PAYING to play.
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Can confirm that after pressing Play and waiting 10mins the game does eventually load
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Guys. Switching to Direct X 11 fixed it for me:
Posting on behalf of my partner who is having issues (but I am not), we have the same PC setup, same everything except he actually updates his drivers and I dont). Ive tried everything to get it to work for him, from reinstalling BNet, loading wow from the .exe and even going into the config file to see if I can force a DX11 start.
Same issue here, the only way around it I’ve found is to just wait. During this time, games will not launch, but show in the task manager, and trying to update will error out.
Think it is the same for me as for you guys .
Trying to play classic .
Clicking Play . Nothing happens .
Yesterday i resolved it by restarting my pc .
Today when it happened I decided to check Task manager and noticed like 5 versions of battle net app running in the background (background processes).
So I killed them all , including the updater and left only the foreground one .
The battle net app blinked and after I pressed Play , the game started.
In fact it started 3 times ( the number of times I clicked before killing the processes) .
very nice. to me gives an error and never start.
Hello again!
To speed up the investigation on the root cause of this situation it would be beneficial for us to see some logs from your systems, taken BEFORE a scan and repair (in other words, if you have already done the scan and repair the logs won’t be as useful 
) .
A detailed guide on how to gather such logs is available here:
If you are still experiencing the issue, and did not do a scan & repair please gather the logs as explained in the link above, upload the zip file somewhere and post the link to the file here using the “preformatted text” option ( </> icon)
The result of using the preformatted text should be something like: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/
Thank you in advance for your collaboration, and for your patience so far!
Except I haven’t changed the setting from -d3d11 and it is the next day and I can’t launch again… tried my dxdiag trick and that didn’t work either. So back to trying over and over to start the game…
The problem stem from the actual WoW.exe launching, its waiting for a response for something as me and my GF launched a few of them, you can see them sitting in the Task Manager. Eventually after say 1-5m they all try to ‘visually’ launch. This is NOT a Desktop App problem.
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Arednies logs</https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IMj6i1QOEVtbzIo5KjwlNVb0HBHZfUXg/view?usp=drive_link>
Yep, while running the logs capture etc, the game launched
no mention of this issue on the US forums , seems like this is unique to EU…