I bypass the launcher all the time. With EIG it will get to the end of the load world bar with just a few pixels to go and then just stops there. No error, no log, just stops forever. Even let it try and load for 8 hours and had to forcefully crash it. I even took and did a complete uninstall, cleaned the registries and then did a full and complete reinstall of all of my disks. Took several hours to get that done, and still can not use EIG.
Using Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit
Even if I could find a viable workaround I would be happy.