Exhausting Reinstall Process
Let me preface by saying with nearly 1,500 hours in FFXIV, I love the game and the development team. However, what happened this morning seriously made me consider unsubscribing and just never playing again.
For whatever reason, Steam decided to randomly think that FFXIV wasn't installed. That was odd, but I figured that by "re-installing" it with a download size of 50mb that something went screwy and it just needed to relocate the file structure. That should have been a warning sign.
Upon launching FFXIV the launcher became CONVINCED that the game was in fact, not installed and attempted to download the game again, so I let it. I then started getting warnings that my C:/ drive was almost out of space. That's when I realized that FFXIV was trying to re-install itself on the C:/ drive despite the game already being installed on the F:/ drive and Steam basing the game files in that drive. I quickly realized that there was no way to change the directory for the install through the launcher and went on a wild goose chase trying to clear up space for the game to try and brute force itself onto a drive that clearly did not have enough room for it.
After a while I realized the game was installing itself into C:/user/(me)/documents/mygames - why it does this, I haven't the faintest idea, but that is the most illogical place for game data to be installed. Save files/settings config, I can understand, but the entire game? So I relocated the file directory onto the F:/ drive and that finally got the launcher to install it elsewhere, but in doing so may have bricked all my other games which will now not know where to look for save/config files. In addition, FFXIV now has two file structures on my F:/ drive.
The icing on the cake is that it deleted all of my settings/hotbar/UI layouts/macros, but I managed to fish them out of a system restore file so it wasn't a total loss.
Any other game and I would have just uninstalled it, cut my losses, and never played again. How do I avoid this ever happening again because this is just a truly insane occurrence..? How do I even begin to understand what happened in the first place? And lastly, how do I know which files I can now delete without risking repeating this process?
Thank you for any support.