As part of the preparations for the launch of Clone States in November, and as part of our continuous efforts to improve account security for EVE Online, we are currently in the process of working on changes to the EVE Online client that will result in the removal of the ability to log into EVE via launching exefile.exe from the EVE\sharedcache\%servername%\bin\ folder.
This change is currently planned to be implemented on September 20th.
After this date, players will no longer be able to log in directly through the front end of the EVE Online client and will instead be required to use the launcher to log in at all times in order to improve account security and streamline the login process.
Some answers to questions posed in the thread:
“The launcher forgets my accounts if I leave it open for too long”
If you are logged in and subsequently enable a VPN connection, the SSO iframe fails and then forgets your accounts. We believe there may also be an issue with time passing or network connectivity loss that we are trying to narrow down to root cause(s).
In the past we have forced the launcher to forget all accounts, for security reasons (and one deployment error). These purges occurred on: 25/11/15, 26/1/16, 8/2/16 and 20/6/16.
“The launcher doesn’t expire logins/refresh tokens”
Accounts management now contains the functionality to delete all SSO tokens – located at https://secure.eveonline.com/LoginHistory.aspx
Changing password manually via account management also automatically does this
The Password Recovery process doesn’t currently have this functionality, but it’s in active development and we aim to deploy it by the end of this week
“The exefile lets me manage my settings profiles and the launcher doesn’t”
The cogwheel next to your account names in launcher login allows you to map separate settings profiles to individual (or multiple) accounts. When/if your accounts are purged from the launcher, these settings profiles are retained on your machine but will need to be remapped to the relevant account once the account has been revalidated in the launcher.
“I use ISBoxer to launch many clients and manage their window positions, especially with borderless windows” / “The Mumble overlay doesn’t work in Windows 10 unless you use exefile”
While ISBoxer and Mumble are unsupported 3rd party software from our perspective, we have reports from players that ISBoxer does also work using the launcher rather than the exefile directly. If there are concerns about 3rd party software functionality or performance with the new system we advise you to raise these concerns with the developers of the software, as is standard practice with all 3rd party software.
“Will third party launchers such as Rapid Light EVE Launcher continue to work?”
While 3rd party launchers may continue to function, we do not support or advocate their use
“The Launcher is vulnerable to DDOS whereas exefile is more resilient”
While the old launcher was subject to load issues and network problems, due to it being hosted in London as a dynamic ASP.NET website, the new launcher website is statically hosted on Amazon S3, with Amazon CloudFront in the front, which should offer additional protection against DDoS attacks.
“Will the old launcher continue to work?”
The old launcher is currently unsupported and will stop working at some point in the near/medium future without any further warning.
“The launcher complains about access rights to its own installation folder”
We believe that most cases can be fixed by running the ‘Fix permissions..’ in the Shared Cache Settings menu.
However, we have seen at least one case where we have been unable to figure out what is wrong, but in that case the user could not create files/folders manually. So in that case, at least, there is a system level problem. Investigations continue so if this issue occurs for you, and Fix Permissions doesn’t solve your problem, please file a bug report with as much detail about your system configuration as you can provide.
“The new launcher throws up certificate issues”
We have an open defect for various certificate issues and hope to roll out a fix soon, but many certificate issues have already been addressed.
