Published 18 August 2010

I’m making this post in the hope that it saves someone from the hour of pain that I’ve just been through with StarCraft II. I was running StarCraft 2 version 1.02 and have been playing it on and off for the last week or so (it’s great by the way!). I figured I would have a quick blast before cracking on with some programming this evening, and was annoyed to find it wouldn’t launch.

The game would load, I would catch a glimpse of the login screen then the game would crash. I’m running Windows 7, so I tried the following things that have reportedly helped others;

  1. ‘Running as Administrator’,

  2. Deleting / Renaming the Battle.Net User Folder,

  3. Opening up my firewall temporarily,

  4. disabling my Anti-virus software,

  5. Running a mal-ware scan (AdAware Free) and virus scan.

  6. Changing my ‘Internet Options -> LAN Settings’ to not use a Proxy / use automatic settings.

After these all failed, I decided to reinstall, which made the problem worse. This time the game would state that I had to download a patch. Upon clicking ok, it would crash and restart - once again telling me to download the same patch. I didn’t see the launcher software at all, just a flash of a black screen.

Anyway, if you’ve tried all of the above and still can’t get it to work - I found a fix that works for me.

I launched IE (which I rarely use, as I use Chrome or Safari) and found that it was set to ‘Work Offline’. When I disabled this option, and tried again - StartCraft II updated and worked fine. Hope it helps someone.

Edit: If you still can’t get it to work, then some additional suggestions have been made in the comments section below. They are;

  1. It’s possible that the BattleNet servers are actually down! There were a lot of people recently visiting this post, but unfortunately, it was simply that there was a period when the BNet servers were down. It’s worth checking Google to see if this is the case. Try disconnecting your Network Cable to run SC2 in Offline mode (Thanks @melsmed).

  2. @Komi has reported that a simple reboot of the router might be all that you need!

  3. @JamesR404 Makes a good point - if the client requires a stable network connection, make sure that there isn’t a firewall / port-block in effect on the router preventing you from connecting to the servers.

  4. @Nathan Thanks for the additional suggestion; “The other day i acquired a virus somehow which changed IE’s proxy settings. If John’s method doesn’t work straight up then check your proxy settings.”

  5. @Denbatte has found that, with Windows 7, if you have a ‘Virtual Wifi Miniport’ enabled (in adapters in the network centre) then you may need to disable any virtual ports that exist (right click -> disable). Many thanks for leaving the additional fix idea in the comments.

Thanks all!