Even if I have to re-purchase Everything...

[DumdogsWorld]

Basically the story of authentication problems come from ESO where the authentication servers on Steam will go down and not be repair for some time in which people on Steam cannot log onto said MMO because Steam can't keep their stuff from breaking. The worst of these "outages" I've heard that it was down for a whole month and I personally don't want to know what effect even more traffic on these fragile servers will do to them. At this point I can't flee from Steam and pray that Square Enix reverses their decision because I'm waaay too deep time and money wise to make another account to get away from Steam.

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but as somebody who migrated from ESO, I can confirm that I used to bypass the Steam related issues by simple making a shortcut to the launcher exe directly. It would ask me for password instead of automatically signing in, just like the standalone accounts, and I could log in even when Steam was down or experiencing issues.

Maybe this game will offer something similar? It's been speculated that they're doing this to appease Valve because Valve hates hosting games without DRM. However, many games with encrypted/protected executables do not actually need a constant internet connection to be played. For example, you can play Skyrim when Steam is in offline mode. If the updated client for Steam does only the bare minimum stuff to appease Valve, then who knows? Offline mode might be an option.