World of Warcraft Updater - Streaming Launcher Status'

The New World of Warcraft Launcher allows you to stream game data while you play. This means less time waiting for patches, and more time playing.

There are three stages of download progress:

SetupCore game content is being prepared. You cannot enter the game at this time.

PlayableMajor game content is not completely applied. You can play, however your game experience will not be ideal.

OptimalFinal game content is almost complete. You may experience a few game issues while playing at this stage.

World of Warcraft Game Client Optimization

The Launcher is optimizing your World of Warcraft install. This is a process we run from time to time to improve game performance and reduce the size of the install on your hard drive.
The entire process will take approximately 15 - 60 minutes under normal conditions. Please do not close the Launcher or run World of Warcraft during this time.
Thank you for your patience!



World of Warcraft is an ever-growing game.  In order to help save you hard drive space, the World of Warcraft Optimization process will periodically clean up your install folder.  This process will remove unnecessary files while consolidating as much data as possible.  Please avoid closing the World of Warcraft Launcher while the optimization process is in progress.
The process itself requires an additional 2-3 GB of hard drive space, but once it's complete your WoW install folder will typically be much smaller.  The optimization does not involve defragmentation, and is safe for solid state drives.
Should you encounter any issues with a patch that included this optimization, be advised that the issue is likely being caused by a variable that is unrelated to the optimization process itself.  Please see the Patch Troubleshooting page for assistance.

During this your computer might get extremely laggy, since the launcher is changing a lot of data files, and most are of several GBs in size.
If you experience any problems try running it again but with Administrative privileges

What does the Blizzard Agent.exe does and what is it?

What is Agent.exe ?
Agent.exe is a new tool, created by blizzard, to help you download faster updates and patches. It offers automatic peer-to-peer (p2p) connection between everyone who is currently downloading or uploading the update or patch which you are downloading.
The file is not hazardous to your computer. You can see that by checking the VirusTotal scan.

What is Agent.exe for?
It's needed by applications such as World of Warcraft and Diablo III to properly run. It makes connections to the official blizzard update servers and also to all of the peers which it discovers. This is why, if you do a netstat, you will see connections to Verizon and such.

How do I stop Agent.exe?
To stop this process, you can simply press CTRL+ALT+DEL and navigate to the Task manager, find the Proccesses Agent.exe*32 or Agent.exe*64 and press Del to close them.

Problems with Agent.exe
I've heard several people having problems with Agent.exe while trying to play WoW on a linux based OS with WineHG (yes, you can play mist of pandaria BETA with WineHG on linux, like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and so on). The trick is that you have to start Blizzard agent manually ($WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/Public/Application\ Data/Battle.net/Agent/Agent.749/Agent.exe --nohttpauth) before starting installation (wine "World of Warcraft Beta Setup.exe").

Another issue which was reported is that your computer might not be able to turn off right after you have played Diablo III Beta. The reason is that the agent.exe is still running and doesn't lets you automatically close it and shut down the computer. You will have to kill the process (as mentioned above) to fix this problem.

Location of Agent:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Battle.net\Agent\Agent.516\Agent.exe
C:\ProgramData\Battle.net\Agent\Agent.440\Agent.exe
C:\ProgramData\Battle.net\Agent\Agent.516\Agent.exe

Technical information about Agent.exe:
Product:     Blizzard Update Agent
Company:     Blizzard Entertainment
Description:     Blizzard Update Agent
Version:     1.0.0.515
MD5:     19163A9F5C1792663F792B00776CA6BE
SHA1:    38B545870B70D1F6F84971B7988B058501DD63A5
SHA256:    63776B7CD6F1F4CC7F1C44C628A96B775A0133A308046933EA442E8306972156
Size:     6313040
Directory:     %ALLUSERS_APPDATA%\\Battle.net\\Agent\\Agent.515\\Agent.exe