Station Launcher

[cyberillusion]

Station Launcher has a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

I had just spent several hours letting Launcher update my EQ2 installation and after it was done, I realized that I was down to a few MB's of space on my "games" drive so I decided that I would try and relocate EQ2 to another drive.  I copied my EQ2 installation to the new drive and proceeded to click "Options" in the launcher, selected Everquest II and clicked Uninstall game.  I got no dialog as to what Station Launcher was about to do or was doing, but my HDD light lit up solid. 

After a couple of minutes, ever single game directory I had on my "Games" drive went away... as in no longer there... and then Launcher popped up an "Uninstall Failer" message... It completely wiped every single game I had installed, every last one of them... It wiped the drive clean.  Needless to say, I'm a little ticked.  Although, luckily, I copied (not moved) my EQ2 installation to another drive, so at least I still have that... although, after this, you'd better believe I'm going to kill that and cancel all my Station subs...

Heres a list of ALL of my games that I had installed and got wiped...

• Shaiya
• Last Chaos
• 12 Sky
• Doom 3
• Quake II
• Quake 4
• EQ
• EQ2
• SWG
• BF1942 (the entire series, Road to Rome, Secret Weapons of WWII...)
• BF Veitnam
• BF2142
• WoW
• LotRO
• FEAR
• FEAR Extration Point
• FEAR Persius Mandate
• FEAR Combat
• Guild Wars
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• RtCW: Enemy Territory

Thats most of them anyway... I have the install CD's, reinstalling isn't a huge deal... the huge deal is that I lost settings, save games, hours upon hours of downloading updates (especially for the MMO's)..

Launcher has an issue... and it needs to be addressed ASAP.

[TSR-DanielH]

Greetings,

 The uninstall application for our games simply would not do that.  I'm not sure exactly what happened on your computer, but I doubt the station launcher was responsible for it.  The most likely causes would be a virus or even an anti-virus corrupting files or possibly a mis-click of some sort when removing the application. 

I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you.  I'm a gamer myself and I know how bad it is to lose all of those files.  This simply couldn't have been caused by the launcher, though, unless it was corrupted by something else.

[cyberillusion]

I ran some tests yesterday on the same drive that it wiped the first time (G: in my case).

I did run a few AV scans using different apps (McAfee, Symantic... etc) as well as some adware scans. I ran a disk check and the disk checked out ok.

I also figured I would check the registry to see where Launcher thought the game was installed... and there it was under the "KnownInstallLocations" entry it said EQ2 was installed under (in my case) "G:Games" rather than where I told it the EQ2 installation was, which was "G:GamesEQ2"... This may very well have been my mistake... I don't know, but I do know that I pointed it at the "G:GamesEQ2" directory.

So, other than the failure to give a conformation dialog (which tells you just what it's about to do and the location and basically asks if you really want to do this or not, which it would normally do) and just doing it, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

As a side not, I am assuming by Launchers behavior (or whatever uninstall process it executes) that it essentially goes into the install directory and just (e.g) "DEL [enter relevant switches here] *.*" the entire installation.  I tried this as a test and added some dummy directories and bogus txt files into the EQ2 directory... and it just wiped everything... so that explains why my entire Game drive went *poof*.

This is a little disturbing and I'm going to be very careful with Launcher from now on... I've even opted to use the old LaunchPad app.  Launcher really should take a little more care in its uninstall processes. It should keep track of the files it installs/downloads and should reference this "check list" when it goes to uninstall so as to avoid situations like this.  If you had a fairly inexperienced user who wanted to install the game to "C:EQ2", but accidently installs the game to "C:" and figures they will just uninstall and reinstall the game, they could be in for a world of hurt.

I've been in this industry for over 15 years, I've been there and done that... don't ever say an application "...simply would not do that...". In my time I've seen code (and hardware) do things they "simply should not have done..."

Launcher (or whatever uninstall process it executes) did wipe my game drive (save the "Games" directory) and it did it apparently by design... It did exactly what its developers told it to do, which was to go into the install directory and just wipe it clean.  In my case, either by user error or some glitch in the application, pointed to "G:Games" and not "G:GamesEQ2".

Its tendency to go in and just wipe out an installation without regard to files/directories that may reside there but do not belong to the installation is a huge concern to me, and I believe IMHO should be seriously looked into.

[GlitterPaws]

I'm really sorry to hear you lost all those games.  My jaws would be clenched pretty tightly too.Did you use the BETA station launcher? My regular old launchpad has no uninstall option.If yes and you've been in the industry 15 years you know that beta means use at your own risk.  It's not a gold disk release.  Heh, I generally wait till the first maintenance release before loading software.Sounds cold, I know, but as someone who has done some damdams to a system with beta ware I, too, learned the hard way that periodic backups really do help the sanity.Hellacious bug find! I'll bet a few programmers are running thru their lines of code .My sympathies and don't stay up all night re-installing. Take a walk between a few apps.gp

[cyberillusion]

I have been using it since beta, but this is the most current release and I can't find beta stamped on it anywhere... I still ahve it installed, but I'm using the old launchpad now.  I started running the beta on another machine, I didn't have any problems with it so I figured [Removed for Content]... I never did test it very well... glitch in my own processes I guess lol. 

I'm not in any real hurry to reinstall everything just yet... only once I get the itch to play one of them. Before I know it, that drive will be full again... I'm just glad that this wasn't as bad as some of things I've managed to do to a PC

[ganjookie]

WOWThat really sucks.  I've been using this beta for awhile.  I've had to uninstall and reinstall it a few times, sometimes once a week.  It won't find my internet connection a lot of the time, so I have to reinstall it then. So far Ive never had all my games wipe.I have them on all on my F: Drive, surely not on my windows drive.

[TSR-TrevorG]

Thank you for the information Cyberillusion, I will forward this to the platform team and see if they can replicate that issue.

[cyberillusion]

TSR-TrevorG wrote:

Thank you for the information Cyberillusion, I will forward this to the platform team and see if they can replicate that issue.

Well, I hope that I was able to help and I do hope they get the issue fixed.

[TSR-DanielH]

Thanks for the info.  I've only ever installed the game to the default directory so I never had cause to run this type of test.  This is good to know.