Whoops, the new launcher than came out today had… issues.
Which I think makes it an official EVE Online feature!
It even got Winterblink to make a Warp Drive Active comic about it.
CCP took their old launcher, which just used to show some news and ads along with checking to see if you game was up to date, and downloading updates if you needed them, and moved the whole login/authentication process into it.
New EVE Launcher
So when it had problems, people couldn’t log in.
And if you could log in, and you had multiple accounts, you might have noticed that using the tab to get to the password field changed which account you selected. I also saw a message from somebody saying that the new launcher ate their UI settings. And that it was made from asbestos.
I was able to get in myself, though I came along later. And others who had problems found that you could still launch from the ExeFile.exe.
All in all, no big deal. We’ll get a fix soon. Just another day in Iceland. It isn’t like they went after the boot.ini file again!
We are never going to let that one go.
But it is a change, and there is one thing I will miss.
I will miss the big splash screen that came up every time you launched the game. I always felt that was part of the game.
Retribution – The Last Splash Screen
I will also miss the little ads that CCP would pop up on the splash screen, ads that informed us about sales on PLEX, EON subscriptions, new features, DUST 514 beta, Burn Jita, the Alliance tournament, Skyward Sphere, and a bunch of other such things. Even the old launcher was so announced. And, of course, they made fun of Diablo III launch issues.
CCP pokes fun at Blizzard
Last year I captured as many as I could and put them together in one picture. The old launcher ad is in there.
Click to enlarge… 3MB file
I have been capturing them again this year, with an eye to creating another such picture. However, now we appear to be at an end of such ads. So I suppose I should get to work on putting that together.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I tried everything [except reinstallation] to get into Eve last night, ignoring the launcher and using the .EXE directly, using the repair tool and failed :-[
Hope I have better luck today…
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I had a slight issue, but 20 mins after trying, I was in with 3 accounts.
I’m not an fan of the new launcher and certainly not happy that there was no warning of its implementation. And yes, I miss the login screen :(
But, I think we EVE players have become complacent, as the impacts of patches and updates have been lessened due to the excellent recent work by CCP to minimize disruption of all sorts. This recent ‘blip’ has caused much angst, but in comparison to the bad old days, this is SFA.
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@Knug – I agree, this glitch was almost nostalgic. I remember when you could pretty much count on the game being down for at least a day when they pushed a big update… and then the hotfixes needed to make it actually work on Tranquility. The word would go out to get a multi-day skill training in all seriousness.
I am surprised they let the splash screen go. That was part of the EVE experience for so long. Ah well.
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I use IXBoxer and launch directly the eve client. I still get the splash screen to login like I have since I started playing EvE and ever since they launched the launcher. Only reason Ive ever used the launched was to do patches; which the splash screen also gave the option of doing.
The launcher, imo, is pointless and a hassle to deal with using multiple accounts. Luckily, for now, there are workarounds to using it.
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@korvus
Good luck with IXBoxer over the long term.
I use 3 accounts and the launcher works just fine with it. However, I play each account, as opposed to using a program to control the other clients for me.
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Well, we got 50K skill points as a reward for our patience. For me, it just takes a lot longer to log in with the new launcher.
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