Battle.net Acting Up? Five Fixes for Games and Downloads

Share ThisGet a free licenseYour squad is waiting in voice chat. You click Play and nothing happens, or the game crashes on the loading screen, or the patch crawls along at the speed of a 2004 DSL line. Reinstalling everything feels like the only answer. It usually isn't.

The Battle.net desktop app (version 2.53 at the moment) has most of the tools you need built in. Some of them hide behind a tiny cogwheel, others in a menu under the Battle.net logo. Here are five fixes, from the gentle ones to the ones you keep for emergencies.

Fix 1: Scan and Repair a broken game

Crashes at launch, missing textures and "file is corrupt" messages often come from one damaged file. Scan and Repair checks the whole install against Blizzard's servers and downloads only what's broken.

1. Open the Battle.net app.
2. Click the game you want to repair.
3. Click the cogwheel icon next to the Play (or Update) button.
4. Choose Scan and Repair.
5. Click Begin Scan and let it finish.

The scan can take a while on big games, and the app may download a few gigabytes if many files are damaged. Close the game first, and let any running update finish before you start the scan.

Fix 2: Install on another drive, or point the app to a game it "forgot"

Your system SSD is full and the next shooter wants yet another huge chunk of it? Choose a different drive when you install.

1. Open the game's page in the Battle.net app and click Install.
2. Under Install Location, browse to the drive and folder you'd like to use.
3. Click Start Install.

For a game that's already installed on the wrong drive, the clean route is to uninstall it in the Battle.net app and install it again with a new Install Location. Yes, that means a fresh download.

There's a shortcut for a different case: the game files are already on your PC (after a Windows reinstall, a new PC or a cleanup), but the app shows Install instead of Play. Then you don't need to download anything.

1. Click the game in the Battle.net app.
2. Click Locate the game under the Install button.
3. Select the game's installation folder.

Once the folder is accepted, the Install button turns into Play. If you have several games scattered over a few drives, let the app find them in one go: click the Battle.net logo at the top left, choose Settings > Downloads and click Scan for Games under Game Installation. In that same spot you can tick a box so the app scans for Battle.net games in the background every time it launches.

Fix 3: Tame (or free) the download speed

A huge patch can choke the whole house's internet while someone else is on a video call. The reverse also happens: the download feels slow, and the reason is a limit you set months ago and forgot.

1. Click the Battle.net logo at the top left and choose Settings.
2. Open Downloads.
3. Find the Download Limits section.
4. Set the Network Bandwidth limit to a value in KB per second that leaves room for everyone else, or set it to 0 for no limit at all.

Pre-release content, such as a game you pre-loaded before launch day, has its own setting. By default it's capped at 1000 KB per second, so check that field too if a pre-load seems stuck in slow motion. If you've set everything to 0 and speed still doesn't improve, the bottleneck is your connection, not the app. A cable instead of Wi-Fi often helps more than any setting.

Fix 4: Switch your play region

Friends in Europe, you in North America? Many Blizzard games let you pick the region before you start.

1. Open the game's page in the Battle.net app.
2. Click the globe icon drop-down above the Play button.
3. Pick the region you want, then click Play.

Overwatch is the exception: you can't choose a play region there, and the game matches you based on your ping.

Fix 5: The reset button for the app itself

When the app hangs on "updating", throws error codes or won't log in even though your internet works, its own data may be damaged. Blizzard's fix is to delete the Battle.net folder in ProgramData, which the app rebuilds by itself.

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager.
2. On the Processes tab, end every Agent, Battle.net and game process.
3. Press Windows+R, type *C:\ProgramData* and press Enter.
4. Delete the Battle.net folder.
5. Start the Battle.net app again and let it update.

This doesn't touch your games or your account. The app may forget where your games are, though, so they show Install instead of Play. Fix 2 has the answer: use Locate the game or Scan for Games, and you're back without downloading anything.

If the error keeps coming back, restart Windows and delete the folder once more. Something else running in the background (an overlay, a security tool or another launcher) may be holding on to the files.

When nothing helps

A few checks are worth a minute before you reinstall anything. Close other launchers and overlays. Pause any VPN or proxy, which can block the login. Add the Battle.net app and your games to the exception list of your security software. If you use Steam, the Epic Games Launcher or GOG Galaxy at the same time, a big download in one of them can make Battle.net look broken when it's just starved of bandwidth.

Our verdict

The Battle.net app is better at fixing itself than its reputation suggests. Anyone with a big library on a crowded SSD, a shared home connection or friends in other regions gets the most out of these settings. Do one thing today: open Settings > Downloads, check the Download Limits and run Scan for Games once, so the app knows where everything lives before the next big patch drops.

Related on UpdateStar

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