WoW download stuck on "initializing"

At wits end now with this rubbish. I managed to play yesterday early evening but by late evening I had the update request showing. So I hit update and it goes to initialising 5% then it will either tell me something went wrong, or that I need to be in admin mode as it can’t access certain folders.

I’m logged in as admin on my 2020 iMac and I must have tried everything to get it going again.

Reinstalled Battlenet, including clearing all the folders of data left by the client after its removed.

Checked folder permissions over the wow folder including rechecking the files within the directory.

Confirmed Wow classic WOTLK is working fine.

This is something to do with agent I suspect as a notification did flash up briefly for it in the corner of the screen that I can’t access now to see what it was moaning about. Possibly also something to do with not certifying the updated client with Apple, maybe. Can’t see why it’s taking so long to get fixed, however. It’s at least 15 hours that the issue has been present.

Had the same issue this morning. The following fixed it for me (will add link to forum thread):

This is commonly caused by the Blizzard Application being out of date. Manually uninstalling and clearing the application should allow the application to be reinstalled.

  1. Press Windows key + R and type in %programfiles(x86)%
  2. Delete anything related to Blizzard or Battle.net
  3. Do the same for %temp%, %programdata%, %localappdata%, %appdata%
  4. Reinstall the application!

Be sure to check em all, I had some folders in all locations. In total 1,5 gigs deleted, and it all together is now only 300 to 400 mb’s… So there was definitely junk in there

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im just elete bnet and wow ,reinstal everything and now its working perfect.

I tried this. Didn’t work. Then I tried uninstalling WoW entirely. Now it’s stuck on that…

installing battlenet app 2h and staying on 89% and cannot push to 90%

2 days ago it was the same…what is this?a private server game?

This line suggests to me that you have a firewall that is denying the outbound connection it’s trying to make.

Still unable to update.
Battlenet tells me I need to log in as an administrator as it has not got permission to alter a folder.
I am logged in as an admin !
I am an admin who has restarted the computer several times now !

This far I have tried :

  1. pretending Im in America
  2. logging out and back in
  3. deleting the battlenet cash
  4. launching the game for the WOW app in the _retail folder
  5. swearing
  6. giving up and having a nap
    and…still no joy !

Oh And Ive been to the accessibility menu and given battlement enough privileges to take control of the computer…though Im not sure how wise this is !

Blizzard please fix your game !!

A friend found this worked for him

(deleting the .idx files from the wow/data/data folder)

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Method 2 worked really well, thank you !

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I’m so pleased!!!

Darn… I know how frustrating that is. Been there myself.

For me this wasn’t the first time, as I’m sure for many of you.

The very first time I had this I ended up having to reinstall the entire game. I’m from a place outside a major city without decent internet (bandwith wise). Downloading/installing wow with about 1,5 max 3mb/sec takes forever :slight_smile:

Good luck and hopefully you can do without such drastic steps.

Not in 2 methods

I fixed it by deleting the 1kb files in the data folder

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Mine started after killing the update agent while “initializing”, it started to download shortly after. The problem is that the fix is not guaranteed for the later log ins.

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I’ve had a similar problem 2 times. Game is supposed to update but gets stuck on “initializing” or “waiting on another update” and then it continuously drains most of my bandwidth while it does nothing for the entire day, as if it just keeps downloading the same file over and over or something. So I can barely even use the internet while it’s busy initializing.

Tried every single solution I could find and nothing worked. Reinstalling the game or b-net doesn’t work either, because the installers just get stuck, so reinstalling is impossible. And it’s not temporary, it just continues like that, week after week.

And the only solution is to plug in my old computer with windows 7, update battle-net and WoW because everything works fine on my old computer, then copy the b-net and wow folders to an usb, and then copy those folders to my new computer with windows 10. After that I could play the game just fine for months, and it would update itself too. And then the same error happened again after I hadn’t played for a year, so I had too boot up by old computer again and redo the same thing. Kinda annoying.

So this is the experience Blizzard wanted me to have when they’ve invited me back to WoW for the weekend?

Stuck on Initializing since y/day (can’t even download the thing), tried all fixes mentioned in this (and not only this) topic.
I was thinking about going back to WoW for new expansion but I guess Blizz made that decision for me :frowning:

Other Blizzard games update/download fine.

TY for ‘allowing me’ to check the ‘new experience’.

EDIT: Same thing goes for the BETA client I have in my downloader (didn’t get any e-mail about invite tho :thinking:)

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Same situation here; tried every fix suggested in this thread but none worked. Now it’s 3 days my updating progress is stuck in the initializing loop. But you got all the money for the pre-orders and now I’m unable to even log-in. Every other Blizzard product I owe is working fine (even deleting and reinstalling from scratch works, takes some time but it’s my connection problem); only WoW has this strange problem. Shame on you.

I’ve been at this s*it since the day before the prepatch, this is not normal anymore. I’m trying the second method from Puny’s video right now to see if it works.

Edit: The solution NR.2 worked, I hope it also sticks for all the other log ins.

Same issue here, and also the battle.net launcher is currently taking forever to "wake up"the update agent. How long does it take to launch a process?