Issues, Workarounds & Localization

After Incarna, I shut down three of my 5 accounts. I didn't totally unsubscribe, but I never threatened to, either.

A slimmed down expert user version should be generated. People will complain until its part of the launcher.

I don't think I've been anything but blunt through this and the announcement thread, so why stop now?
This promise should have been said before you even mentioned taking the bin/ExeFile bugfix away.
At least some of my criticism would have been irrelevant in that case.

You asked before what I saw as problems with the launcher. I think my way of explaining it would be to say what I desire of a launcher, what I don't want in a launcher, and what I can't accept in a launcher.

I want the launcher to update my game (preferably fast, which is why I thought the peer-2-peer thing was nice); launch my game; give me access to repair tools. The launcher itself should be 1-click-done once I have started the launcher from Windows. I understand from a company perspective you also want news articles/dev blogs/patch notes etc., and although I personally don't need that and would disable it if I had the chance, I see no issues with it.
What I don't want in a launcher is attempts to sell me anything, or load (or dependency on) anything from the web except actual game updates. These things have nothing to do with launching the game, and any sort of delay here is a clear-cut nuisance.
What I can't accept in a launcher is social media (fb, twit, YT, myspace, G+, linkedin etc etc etc), and any extra clicks that are in the way of my use of the launcher: launching the game. The launcher should not do anything once I have launched the game.

If you build the launcher into the game (As it was when the login frontpage was the updater) then it should be even fewer clicks. For a main (From starting the launcher from Windows), it should be type password, enter (confirm pw), enter (select default char). For an alt, 1 click before that to select which one. Here, people who set their system up to handle separate clients should always only have the mains' login sequence.
Currently, the login page does that, but the launcher doesn't.
This is a question of design, the point I have contended.

Other things, such as 2 EULA accepts required per account per launcher, or verifying the client for 30-60 seconds, or "you seem offline, you can still rage on the EVE-O forums!", or memory bloat... to me seems like bugs that would be ironed out no matter which launcher design philosophy was used. They shouldn't happen, but ... well, software will always be buggy on first release.

Some time (I think FanFest 2011 or 2012) CCP talked about securing login services, master accounts etc. These issues would be meaningful to change the login procedures to accomodate. Right now, all I saw was that you took something that should be so simple that any idiot could do it, and turn it into a slow, meaningless caricature of a launcher, then promised to make it awesome later, and remove the workaround to escape from the launcher.
I don't think anyone should be surprised at the outrage.

With the promise you made above, however, I'll be waiting to see what you do, not what you say.

We're not ignoring you. It's just that your problem is a little different than most. I had to uninstall/reinstall to get back into the game, but I didn't have any problems.

Sorry.

How about cutting out all the bling? It's a launcher for chrisake. It's a launcher after all. It should launch, ONLY.

I find those launcher ads unattractive and hardly noticeable in comparison to old login screen one-time advertisements.
OFC only CCP have click metrics and they may show other picture, but I still think that launcher ads will have less informative value than old splashes.

Looks like it's time to start shooting a monument again.

ok i might have fixed my problem. I did a system restore and now an EVE repair witch i was not able to do befor

Another thing that bothers me about this whole horror show, and I think I mentioned it in the other thread, is that many of the people who have had problems have had DIFFERENT problems.

It only took me 4 hours to get back into the game, and I feel I was one of the lucky ones, because there are still some that can't play at all.

I realize that several different OSes are represented, with different settings, but still, how could that happen?

Some people have been able to fix it with the Repair tool, but that didn't work at all for me.

Some people got it to work by downloading and installing the update manually. That didn't work for me either.

Some people lost their settings, even after a 'fix' for that was posted.

Some people suffer from erratic launcher behavior, even after 4 days.

I've never tried to write anything for use on more than 500 computers, all with the same OS, but they were not configured the same, and didn't have the same software packages on them. I've never even heard of a mess like this before. What happened?

I see the discussion is going well, will probably end somewhere around 50 pages or more.
But there is one downside to it: it's still just talk, and in forums words are cheap, as they can be ignored, unread, unanswered or whole topics locked.

As such I'd like to offer two posibble actions:

1: Change your eve lauching shortcuts to exefile.exe and ignore launcher altogether.
CCP Atropos claimed there are ways to differentiate between people launching eve with launcher or exefile. Let them see we don't use launcher, as a measurable sign it's broken.
And if you need to update your client do that with repair tool. Works faster and more reliably.

2: If for some unfathomable reason you need to have launcher, but consider it's performance unacceptable file a bug report.
As mentioned in topic about gas clouds causing slowdowns performance issues qualify as bugs, so file them as such every time you are unhappy with new launcher. Few thousand bug reports in a week should make a nice, noticeable data sample.
This way is superior to whining about in forums, because on the other side of bug report is customer service whose job is to read all of them, categorise them, and send them to proper dev team to fix. And include them in proper statistics.