Sometimes when I want to play wow, it doesn’t launch the game. When I click play in the battle.net app, nothing happens. It does change to launching for a second or two, then it goes back to play. Restarting my computer doesn’t help.
This doesn’t happen every time. There are times (luckily most of them) when the game launches immediately and in other cases it takes several minutes for the game to start. Anyone can give me some ideas as to how it can be fixed? Everything is up-to-date.
I’ve got the same issue. Only started a few days ago - prior to that everything was fine. I’ve tried restarting etc. Did find sometimes that if I closed the launcher I would find the game running behind it - but that’s hit and miss too.
You need to actually… let it launch, instead of keeping hammering the play button expecting it to load instantly.
People with older PC’s, slower hard drives, and even some AV programs (bitdefender is especially bad for this), will experience a delay between hitting play, and the game actually loading.
Happens with 4090/13900K or 7950X3D systems as well Trovlak, stop blaming the peoples PCs.
Stop cherrypicking my statements, and consider the WHOLE of what I said.
I grew out of cherrypicking arguments to score virtual points over 30 years ago, lol
If that were the case, wouldn’t the delay happen every time? It’s a little over 50/50 that the game launches at once and has a delay of several minutes.
Yeah, i don’t think you’re right here. If it happens occasionally that means it’s a bug, kinda.
If it doesn’t launch can you check in task manager and expand on bnet, see if wow is attached to it. Can you end task and try again? If not can you try launching from the _retail folder
Yeah, no this isn’t the case. I have this issue and have, as a test to see if I’m just being too impatient, pressed ‘Play’ one time, and then gone away from my PC for a bit, got a drink, did some chores, whatever it was. I was gone maybe somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. Came back and the game hadn’t launched. Was there as a background process in task manager but not actually loaded.
I have a sort of temporary fix to this issue, or at least it’s worked twice for me now. I followed the steps to delete the Battle.Net tools folder and after doing that the game launches. The problem does come back however so until the issue is properly fixed you’d have to keep doing this every time it happens.
It’s definitely a new bug - because I’ve been playing WOW since 2006 (off and on) and never had this issue before - and I’ve gone through a few PC’s in that time too. 
And prior to the last few days - I used to log in smoothly.
This problem still isn’t solved. Anyone has any good ideas? Even deleting and re-installing the game doesn’t help. Rebooting game/computer neither.
I have the same issue currently, and it happens *every-single-time-I-start-my-PC-and-thus-Battle-Net". I have a fast SSDs, PCPU & GPU, so that can’t really be it. The only thing I can do is to either do a repair, every time, or empty certain cache files as is described elsewhere on support pages. Even reinstalled (with manually deleting remaining folders not removed by the deinstaller). Everything, and I mean everything else, Diablo III, IV, Hearthstone launches without a problem, as do other (new and old) games on a broad range of launchers.
I have encountered this before, but it was maybe once or twice. I have seen threads over the years describing the same issue with the same “solutions” that work only temporarily, no “real” solution (so no, this is nothing new as Innara claims, s/he was probably just lucky). For me it’s the battle.net launcher that is messing something up. But after many years, I assume this will never be solved ?
If anyone does have something reasonable to contribute, I am all ears. Blizzard themselves perhaps?
This bug is shame for blizzard… Have a no clue why we paying every month if we can’t play game normal…
It’s completely random. Sometimes it launches with a minute delay and sometimes it takes a lot longer. On certain occasions it doesn’t start at all and it becomes impossible to enter the game both through .exe file and launcher.
Any news about it?
Fix it already… !
Still without solution?
cmon blizzard, fix it!
We’re not aware of any issues that would be causing the game to just not launch, but we have seen a number of cases over the years where other software interferes with the normal operation of the game.
As such, one of the first things we always suggest in cases like this, outside of a Scan & Repair and User Interface reset, to make sure you don’t have any damaged game files, would be to make sure any background applications are closed and then try it.
If you do continue to have issues after that, please open a ticket and include the systems diagnostic files outlined here so we can take a look.
It started 3 or 4 months ago and it is some problem with battle.net launcher so it must be fixed.
Hope blizzard team will check it and fix it as you can see there are many people game same problem.
Also i think i found “solution”
If your game “wow” doesn’t launch after 1 minute when u click PLAY button in battle.net then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to open Task Manager, find wow.exe and close, end proccess.
Then just normaly exit battle.net program, wait few seconds, open battle.net and try to click PLAY button and hope it will help.
This solution works for me most of time.
Hope it is also good reason for battle.net team to investigate that problem, bug.
It’s not a reliable solution or a workaround. Sometimes you will run into this issue, other time you won’t, but when you do, there’s a high chance you’ll fail at launching the game for the next 15 minutes.
WoW is the only game on the bnet app which suffers from this problem.
If you play the game once a day you probably won’t notice it, this happens primarily on subsequent launch attempts.