I'm disappointed that it's been over a week and SE hasn't said anything at about this, despite the number of players who have posted in forum threads, on reddit and probably even contacted support.
At this point it seems people are just using workarounds to reverse these requirements that SE was trying to make:
- Steam users are adding an extra parameter when they start it up so they can continue to launch the game outside of Steam.
- Non-Steam users are editing the Steam configuration to remove that same extra parameter so they can continue to launch the game through Steam.
The only people still affected by this are those that have actually bought the game twice and have two different service accounts/subscriptions. They can no longer quickly switch service accounts and now have to exit the game completely, select a different startup shortcut and have all the hassle of logging back in again.
The original post by SE said it was to force Steam users to run it via Steam. Since they can still do that, can you please just remove these restrictions. I used to swap accounts/characters all the time (literally swap, do something, swap back, do some more things, swap again...), but in the last week I've hardly played on either account because it's frankly too much effort to swap now. Maybe I should drop the second subscription and play on the one account, but the joke is on me as I just paid for 6 months before this happened :(
Sorry for the bitter post, but I've really enjoyed playing this game for 6 years. Then all of a sudden it's now a chore to actually get onto my characters that I've worked on for so long... so I hope you can understand why I'm bitter...
It's like right now, I want to switch characters to one on another service account, but that now involves closing the game completely and I'm seriously thinking is it worth the effort to start it all back up again... or shall I just go play something else...
Edit: So I did log back in, and then hit "Start" without thinking instead of "Data Center":
https://i.imgur.com/16zQune.png
Which then throws me out of the game completely. If nothing else, can you please just make that error at least return you to the main menu? Everytime I launch the game now I have to try to remember to click "Data Center" (because I'm unsure which service account I was on last and if I don't pick the right one it throws me out...)
Sorry, it's just very very very frustrating when something works well for over 5 years and now it's just a total mess.