Yes, the only thing the launcher is good for is getting updates, and presumably there will be no more updates, so it's fairly useless at this point. You can run the game without the launcher by creating a shortcut to "cityofheroes.exe -launcher -project coh -auth 64.25.36.88"
If you just want a copy of the client, a simple file copy of the CoH directory is all you need. It doesn't need to be "installed" to work. That's been my preferred method of installing the game for at least the last 8 issues.
Sorry to restart an old thread, but:
I tried this. On a new laptop, I copied my CoH directory from my desktop, made a shortcut to cityofheroes.exe, and set the shortcut target to
"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\cityofheroes.exe -launcher -project coh -auth 64.25.36.88"
But when I try to accept that shortcut, I get a pop-up
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The Name "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\cityofheroes.exe -launcher -project coh -auth 64.25.36.88" specified in the Targetbox is not valid. Make sure the path and file name are correct.
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Any idea what the problem is?
At this point, my main concern is that, in another week, I won't be able to get the CoH client working on any new computers. If anyone does get any sort of server emulator working, it would be a pain if it only worked on computers that were running CoH pre-shutdown.