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MaverickWH's avatar
MaverickWH
6 years ago

Origin client constantly running games with --reactivate option

Not sure when this started occurring, but I've noticed recently that while I'm playing something in full screen mode, it minimizes periodically - like every 3-4 minutes.  I'm running multiple monitors and was watching task manager closely and was able to pinpoint that this caused directly by the origin client.  From what I can tell, origin launches most of the games in my library with a "--reactivate" command line option every few minutes regardless of whether or not I'm actually playing or not?!  This causes both heavy disk usage and cpu usage every few minutes.  I went through all of the options within your origin client, but couldn't find anything to tweak this.  Please help.  I recently picked up your annual subscription, but cannot recommend this to anyone until this gets resolved.  It's absolutely ridiculous for my pc to constantly be cycling through everything in my library.  As much as I hate DRM, if you must use it, use it when I actually launch a game to play it - don't just freely run all of my games in the background whenever you decide!!

I've been watching this closely for the past hour and it's almost like clockwork to watch all of my games being ran in successive order.  I can also confirm that this is only occurring with Origin titles.  When I close the Origin client, the problem goes away.  I can't imagine how horrible this would be if I was on a slower computer.

I can provide screenshots if need be.  Is there a service, or any registry settings that can be tweak so that this doesn't occur so frequently?

Thanks

technical issues

3 Replies

  • N7_A_M_R_Egypt's avatar
    N7_A_M_R_Egypt
    Seasoned Veteran
    6 years ago

    I had a similar issue: Origin was launching "Sea of Solitude" game on its own every min or so.. I finished the game and uninstalled and this didn't happen again.. 

    But your case I have seen it on Reddit:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/origin/comments/e9sv2y/origin_keeps_launching_games_on_its_own/

    I haven't seen a fix tbh, but I assume it is either the beta or one of the recent Origin updates that is causing this

    Are you participating in Origin Beta (you can check from top black bar > Origin > Application Settings > APPLICATION

    If not then do you have the latest Origin version ? (Version 10.5.63.37653 - 758549) you can check from top black bar > Help > About

  • MaverickWH's avatar
    MaverickWH
    6 years ago

    Thanks for the response.  On the application tab, all the sliders are turned off including the beta.  I'm on the same version - 10.5.63.37653 - 758549.  For that matter, I have just about everything disabled on the application tab, and even more including all of the origin in-game controls too.

    There's also a few good ideas from the reddit thread to try too like clearing cache, however, I don't think it will do the trick, but I will at least try.

    I've attached a few screenshots of my task manager when these things are running.  It's tough to capture it as it only appears for a few seconds every few minutes.  On one of them, I was playing Crashlands, and out of nowhere, I see unraveltwo running for a short moment.  The other screenshot shows anthem - mind you, I wasn't play any games at the time.  From the command line args, you can see that it was launched with the argument "--reactivate", so that leads me to believe it's being launched directly from origin's client.

    The last screenshot that shows the disk usage is more telling in that you can briefly see a small snapshot of a handful of the games all being ran at the same time.  When watching them though task manager, they all have the same argument "--reactivate".  I'm wondering why they feel the need to do a license check on all of my games every few minutes...

    It seems like this would be more concerning on users that aren't running a beefy system as simply launching madden20 uses up a ton of memory on launch (and yes - it's one of the offenders).

    Thanks!

  • N7_A_M_R_Egypt's avatar
    N7_A_M_R_Egypt
    Seasoned Veteran
    6 years ago

    Don't really have that much experience I don't know why or from where this command line is coming from

    Still in your Origin Library > right click on any of those games > Game Properties > Advanced launch options > see if the "Command line arguments" box is it empty or not

    Normally that box should be empty unless you add a command line and save it.

    Also maybe check the shortcut you start Origin from maybe its Target box has a command line ?

    I hope a mod or a community manager with more experience in this would step in and help more.. though I know first thing they will post is clear the cache thing:

    https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/faq/clear-cache-to-fix-problems-with-your-games/

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