Steam/FF14 issues

[Surbrus]

This has been an ongoing issue for myself. No error code is given or anything, upon opening the game through steam, the FFXIV client is deemed to be out of date and must repatch everything.

This issue occurs with other games on steam as well. From what I am able to gather through my google research, is that this is specifically an issue that occurs due to the fact that Steam's version is extremely out of date compared to the actual live version of the game (which the FFXIV launcher must update).

It seems that upon Steam closing down, there is a chance that an error will occur where the version data for Steam and FFXIV will become out of synch. Upon this happening, Steam will proceed to delete all of the files it does not recognize (everything from v2.1 and onward). Thus, upon Steam closing down, there is a chance that Steam will have an error which will delete the majority of the game files, thus you must redownload the client in order to play once more.

The obvious solution is to not use Steam. The problem with this solution however, is that apparently your PC account is flagged as a Steam account, and thus you will not be able to log into your PC account on a non-Steam version.

This issue has happened to me so many times that I'm forced to consider starting out from square one with a different account, or reconsider playing the game at all if I cannot de-link from Steam, which appears to be the entirety of this problem. Already being so invested in time and money, it'd be a shame. Is there really no way to de-link and salvage a Steam account?

EDIT: PS: First post. I only found this forum and decided to post because I wanted to play FFXIV tonight, but upon opening up Steam, the only FFXIV I have is 10-15 hours of patching, once more. This has been an issue I've had with Steam with other games going back several years, even though I've only owned FFXIV for several months.