If you haven’t been introduced to the game before, here is a brief intro. Overwatch is a first-shooter game in which players are grouped into two teams of six players each to outperform their enemies and perform certain quests along the way. Blizzard Entertainment gets the credit for publishing this game. The game’s success led to the announcement of its sequel which is expected to go on the floors soon.
It is important to know that the desktop application of Blizzard Battle.net makes use of an “Agent”. Agent helps in the installation as well as the patching of various Blizzard games. For what it’s worth, Overwatch is one of those games.
Blizzard Agent went to Sleep Problem
Ever since its creation, players across the world have brought up an issue with the agent. The problem is read as “Blizzard Agent went to sleep. Attempting to wake it up…”
Whenever this issue pops up, the game gets stuck and no possible options are given to the user on the screen to troubleshoot it and get the game going back again. Taking into account the multiplayer nature of the game, such an error can adversely affect an entire team.
There are multiple threads on different discussion platforms to address this issue so players can tackle this issue timely in the future.
To resolve a problem, it is important to identify the reasons causing it in the first place. In case of the concerned problem, a main reason hasn’t been identified yet. However, many members in the Overwatch community have shared their takes which are listed below:
- The problem surfaces after restarting the router.
- The message pops up while trying to boot up battle.net
- The issue becomes a reoccurring one after it happens the first time (reported by multiple users in the last year or two)
- It happens due to a corrupted Blizzard App Launcher
This problem carries extra damage during the competitive play season. Not only do the players get logged out of the ongoing match, they are also liable of facing a 10-minute suspension as well as an additional loss. Therefore, it became crucial to find a fix for this problem.
Fortunately, the Overwatch community houses countless talented individuals who have come up with multiple solutions to the Agent sleeping fiasco. For starters, troubleshooting guides were referred to for patching the corrupted Blizzard App Launcher (https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/34721 and https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/34719). Long story short, these guides suggest that the problem with the launcher can either be due to missing or corrupted files and directories or a corrupted cache folder. From there on, the guides detail the potential fixes.
If that doesn’t prove to be helpful, players should close the App, launch the task manager and kill all instances of “Agent.exe”. Another interesting fix was also among the suggestions. If you are familiar with and have VMWare Workstation installed on your system, you might want to delete it. It has been observed that uninstalling it has not only eliminated the issue, but has also helped in other regards.
The classic resolution technique of re-launching the launcher as well as the game can still come in handy too. The downside to it is that it will cost the player around 15-20 minutes to return to the game, which can be quite costly.
Overall, it can be said that there still remains mystery surrounding the issue. The fair assumption for now would be that the issue keeps on surfacing with different players and new ideas of potential fixes keep hitting the web. Until then, it is best to keep an eye on the Battle.net Cache, Files and Folders.