permissions issues with windows 10 (Solved, posting for others)

I'm posting this as it seems to resolve several issues surrounding the game. and I think others will benefit from this.

Since upgrading to windows 10, I've had several issues running the game. Mainly, directx 11 not staying enabled in the launcher, and saved gear sets not saving correctly. In both cases, whenever the game shuts down, the settings would revert to their previous state, and gear sets would reset to their pre-modified state.

After much testing, I found that by running the game launcher (ffxivboot.exe) as administrator allow both to be saved. Note that even though I am an administrator on my system, the game still has to be run as an administrator in order to get it to save the settings. Trying to run as administrator from the start menu doesn't seem to work as well, but some more testing is needed on that point for verification. For the time being, I have set ffxiv.exe to always run as administrator via the compatibility settings under properties.

I also had to go through the game files, and ensure that the modify security permissions are set for the install folder, and the settings folder under my documents.

Both of these things helped resolve the bulk of my issues with the game since upgrading to windows 10, and hopefully, it will help others as well. There is definitely some sort of weird permissions issue going on with the game and windows 10. Hopefully, someone with a higher level of knowledge on the subject then my own will be able to put more detail to solving this issue.

This has been an ongoing issue with Winblows ever since Vista launched--and in some cases even XP for that matter. Why most every one of the threads will have running as Admin as one of the first several suggestions. I recently put up a sort of how-to post on adjusting the permissions to the character's folder and then propagating the change to all child objects in one of the other threads here:

Gear Sets and Skills not saving after Logging Out or Exiting Game (SAME PC), post #4

The same principles can be applied to the game's installation folders and such as well if you like---but setting the shortcut to always run as admin for all users should resolve it in many cases.

Another place we see lockouts occurring is from additional layers of security--antivirus, anti-malware, firewalls, Windows Defender...they may need to have exceptions set for both flat-file scans as well as network activity.