EA WRC not starting after 1.9 patch

I am happy to report that VR is now working again on my Quest 3 post v1.9  -  I think they pushed a patch because now instead of saying v1.9 it says v1.9_vr_beta

Also I reinstalled to the latest nvidia driver 560.81

However I still like to know why is there No Devs at all here on the Forum helping or giving advice or telling about a fix and why did they release a broken patch ????  

C'mon Man this is NOT good enough !!!

Though I can START the game fine on steam, I can't do anything online related, like clubs or moments. The steam version just won't connect to EA servers. 

Trying the game in the EA App, it works just fine. And yeah I had to buy EA play just for to try that ....

I reinstalled and verified the game files a 1000 times by now. Steam did in a few of the verification times say 3 files were not good, but even then it didn't work.

But not every solution is "try and reinstall it" it's so easy to say that. It's a Steam bug i.m.o. 

Other thing: I installed the game on my GFs PC while logged into my Steam Profile. That worked perfectly. 

For some reason after update 1.9 on my PC it began with connectivity issues after stages and since a few days it won't connect at all. After reinstalling, verifying, clean boots, resets of network....the list goes on. 

Product: EA SPORTS™ WRC
Platform:Steam-PC
Summarize your bug Game crashes after v1.9 update
How often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)
Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Start the game after about 20 seconds in menu game crashes and bring you back in steam
What happens when the bug occurs? Crash back to steam
What do you expect to see? Fix it. Make the game working again.

‌

Nothing, worked like a charme before 1.9 update. Did evything you asked like reinstalling and run as admin….nothingnworked

Posting this on behalf of an EA WRC discord member called Pepper 

I have been struggling with this issue since the 1.9 patch as well. I notice there are a few different ways in which the game does not start for people. For me, I get to the start of the fullscreen EA logo splash, then it instantly crashes to desktop without an error given.
I have already tried
* Verifying the installation.
* Full uninstall and reinstall
* Renaming the movie file that runs the EA logo splash, but that just makes it crash earlier
* Turning off all services and startup programs
* Checked if SecureBoot is enabled (it is)
* Checked event logs for errors
* Wanted to run ProcMon while starting the game, but the anti cheat spyware does not allow this
* Renaming some folder that a user said can fix the issue
* Every other suggestion offered by users that I've read but forgot about by now

Saw this potential fix posted on Reddit. Tried it and manually running "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" worked for me. Haven't had a single problem launching the game from Steam since doing that.

• Make sure the game is installed on your C: drive

• Go to C: Program Files (x86): Steam: steamapps: common: EA SPORTS WRC: WRC: Binaries: Win64

• Right click on "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe"

• Select "Run as administrator" (not sure if running as admin is even necessary, but better safe than sorry).

• The EA Sports WRC pop-up should appear, with the little white loading bar at the bottom. The bar should load, and after this some new files should be dumped in the folder. After that, the EA Sports WRC pop up should disappear.

• Right click WRC.exe and "run as administrator".

After that you should be able to exit the game, and from then launch the game normally from Steam using the green "Play" button. I've tried launching the game from Steam three times and every time it now launches without issue.

It seems that the files that manually running the "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" as detailed above dumps into the folder named above are required for the game to launch properly since Patch 1.09.

Hi @waz84 

When you first encountered the problem was the game installed on your C:\ drive?

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@waz84 wrote:

Saw this potential fix posted on Reddit. Tried it and manually running "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe" worked for me. Haven't had a single problem launching the game from Steam since doing that.

• Make sure the game is installed on your C: drive

• Go to C: Program Files (x86): Steam: steamapps: common: EA SPORTS WRC: WRC: Binaries: Win64

• Right click on "EAAntiCheatGameServiceLauncher.exe"

• Select "Run as administrator" (not sure if running as admin is even necessary, but better safe than sorry).

• The EA Sports WRC pop-up should appear, with the little white loading bar at the bottom. The bar should load, and after this some new files should be dumped in the folder. After that, the EA Sports WRC pop up should disappear.

• Right click WRC.exe and "run as administrator".

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Having over 30 years of experience using a computer as a developper, I tried all of that before coming here and more after the official support asked me to do things that have nothing to do with the game nor the anti-cheat. Still, it will close immediately after the splash screen. But that's what you get when you use kernel level process, it messes with things that are hard to identify (I mean if anything 19 of July should have been a wake up call for lot of developpers).

I am not planning to test every single one of my drivers, services and hardware pieces to see which one conflict with the game. Not my job. Especially when all was working fine for 7 months and nothing changed on my end.

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@EA_Groguet wrote:

Hey there,

Thank you very much for your reports. I have escalated this to the game team

-Groguet

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@EA_Groguet, out of curiosity I checked further and the same issue is affecting all of EA games basically, whatever the launcher, whatever the systems, so it is linked to the anti-cheat and whatever conflict it may have with the end user machines, nothing to do with the game version. The game team can most likely do nothing about this. Reach out to the Anticheat developpers so that get fixed accross the board for all games. Their kernel level programming issues are going to ruin EA customer potential overall if nothing is done. I guess we all saw what kernel level bad code can do a month ago, right ?

most of their sales are probably on consoles, while this seems to be a PC related problem for those of us who run stuff on different parts of their harddrive while the C: only players seem not to be affected, like the consoles. Still waiting for some sort of solution, meanwhile I'll fire up Sebastian Loeb Rally again, lol.