i have been experiencing, on my windows computer, the same problem it seems countless other players have experienced with their world of warcraft accounts: becoming stuck at the loading screen. for a week, i had not been able to log into my main character, a level 53 hunter, at all. warcraft would load, i’d login, i’d choose the character, and the loading screen would popup, the percentage bar would fill up 100% with blue, and then: frozen. i can hear the background noise of the city i’m in, and when i push keys on my keyboard, i can hear the corresponding sounds, but the loading screen will not go away. and when i alt-tab away from warcrack, then try to tab back, the entire program would freeze, and i’ve have to force quit it.

i can’t tell you if the same problem happens when i play on my mac, because there hadn’t been internet where my mac is located for the week this problem was happening.

then tonight, back at my windows computer, it got even worse. not just my main character, but ALL my characters, this happened to. how it started: i went to my second alt, level 43 rogue, and petitioned a gamemaster, saying my main character was stuck, frozen loading screen, and i’d heard that if they moved my character from the city it was in, that might help. it was a long wait, but a gamemaster finally got back to me, and he said, i just tried moved your character, try logging into that character to see if it worked. so i did, and same problem: loading screen still stuck, though i can hear the city noise. force quit wacrack. reload, log back into my alt, loading screen and… now the loading screen is frozen on my alt. i force quit, restart, multiple times, now my alt is permanently stuck. i can’t even reply to the gamemaster (i can hear his little whisper sound), to let him know that i’m stuck in the void, sorry, unavailable right now, but when i return back to your dimension i’ll return your calls.

i go to a 3rd alt, the level 30 warlock. i login once, and it logs in fine. i log out, to test. log back in… and now the loading screen is stuck for this player. i try the other 2 characters, and they’re still frozen.

i login to a 4th alt, one of my bank characters, he’s a level 1, stationed in ogrimmar, stores all my potions and herbs. logins in fine. testing a theory, i log back out, then try to log back into that character: now the loading screen is frozen. i go to another character, another bank toon, and same thing happens. first load, it logins fine, then second time i try to login, the loading screen is frozen, and i lose access to this character completely.

i go to a 5th alt, and this time with a heightened sense of surreality, like i’m in the twilight zone, and my world is being taken over by body snatchers, and i am experiencing existential noise.

in the midst of this, i’ve tried all the forum recommended tricks. restart the computer. delete your profiles from the program folder. delete the wtf and cache folders. none of it worked. i am slowly losing all my characters. i see another forum post, and it tells me to find repair.exe in the program folder, and run it. so i do; it takes about 5 minutes. when it finishes, i find that it had completely flushed out everything, restored warcrack back to its default install. the intro sequence plays again, that long movie with the swelling music in the background (always makes me feel fuzzy), i have to download updates, etc. i log into my main character, the hunter, and…. there he is, clear as day, standing, all out of place, in the undercity gardens, where the game warden had apparently placed him.

so temporarily, i have warcrack back, but i shall see what happens when i try to play further. (i also should say that though this, at least so far, worked for me, one, the problem may come back, and two, in researching this problem, i’ve noticed that running warcrack’s repair.exe file doesn’t fix the problem for everybody.) i shall report back to this post with further updates if applicable.