how to reveal my password autosignin/how to get back into my account without email

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I didn't use my real email when setting this up and because I was just trying to test the game I think I used some throwaway. I actually can get in on the one machine is how I finally figured out what I think my screen name is but I have no bloody clue what the password is or what email I used. The really aggravating thing is that I can actually just launch the game on the other machine, but the stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "social club" launcher that seems to automatically sign in when I launch through steam when I open it up it just gives me a blank email and password field. No nothing, no stored password, no email. So how do I figure out what my email is? How can I reveal my stored password? Failing that could I just clone the stupid launcher folder and download that directly onto my new system drive?

For emphasis: I do not know what the email is but I am sure it's not one I would've used before elsewhere and I don't think I wrote it down anywhere in my password bookthis is one of the many reasons why I hate third party launchers with a passion and HATE needing an account to play my games even more, Starcraft 2 is literally unplayable for this reason I think that's the only game I ever bought in my life I never got to play again, and also the last time I ever gave Blizzard money I could plausibly guess the password, but it might've been some random string too, I'm not sure what I used. Is there some settings file in the launcher folder I can just duplicate and install on my new PC? Althogh I suppose that doesn't actually fix the underlying problem...is there some way to go intot he "social club" launcher and force it to show password and email?

[ShelLuser]

You don't. And you can't, software doesn't even store actual passwords these days, that's way 90's, but these days so called hashes are used: phrases that mimic your password based on an algorithm.

It allows the software to check for your password without actually storing it. So even if you could break things open you would never get to see your actual password.

It's kinda lazy IMO to blame 3rd party launchers for you own sloppiness with regards to your account & password....

Alas:
https://support.rockstargames.com/categories/200013106?step=dae70f6c

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by ShelLuser:

You don't. And you can't, software doesn't even store actual passwords these days, that's way 90's, but these days so called hashes are used: phrases that mimic your password based on an algorithm.

It allows the software to check for your password without actually storing it. So even if you could break things open you would never get to see your actual password.

It's kinda lazy IMO to blame 3rd party launchers for you own sloppiness with regards to your account & password....

Alas:
https://support.rockstargames.com/categories/200013106?step=dae70f6c

I shouldn't HAVE TO use a fing launcher and password recovery system at all! This is one of the only games I even have on my machine out of literally HUNDREDS that requires me to have a password and an account to play singleplayer sandbox. I don't need to use a freaking launcher to get into Witcher 2 dude, and it was HORRIBLE that CDPR eventually changed to where I needed one extra point of failure and layer of bloatware to do what it was doing before, opening the game. That's it. There's no need for it. I don't have this problem on Vice City or GTA III. It's willful obtuseness and it's clearly one of THE top problems for this game and has been.

My point being it's autosigning in, I just need it to leave the email/password in the actual field. I'm not looking for some text file with it stored in cleartext I'm trying to find a way to either enable my login being displayed on the launcher (I have no idea why it isn't honestly since it seems I clicked remember me before) or which file has the hash if it can just be manually copied to a flash drive and then dumped on the other machine but Rockstar's bloatware is huge so was hoping to just find a quick way to not leave the fields blank on signin.

[ShelLuser]

Take it up with R* then.

In the end the launcher existed since... forever. The use of 3rd party launchers or the requirement for 3rd party account registrations is always explicitly mentioned on a store page.

So... why buy this game on PC in the first place if you're so against 3rd party launchers?

Makes little sense to me.

But alas, your only option is R* support. Like I said: take it up with them, only thing you can do.

[psykoteky]

You quoted me/my help in another thread to rant? Had to look at your post history to find this thread to see if you gave other details. You did, I guess if I'm reading correctly. Anyway-

You 'might' be able to copy your my documents / rockstar games folder - from the working pc - to the non-working pc - and that 'might' work. Again, this 'might' work. The game used to login via username, and that was changed to email long ago - /insert the creation of that giant help link/ticket fiasco to verify/authorize accounts/relog in/accept eula nonsense they pushed, and people actually had 'lost' their accounts and didn't know because of steam autologins but I digress. People capable of supplying their credentials should have zero problems logging in on a new pc.

You also 'might' find some old info/email in the various logs/etc stored in my docs / rockstar games / subfolders/etc - but that relies on some other bits of luck. You could also see if you lucked out saving login credentials on the old pc in your browsers IF you used that to sign into social club. And of course, forgot password, and check your emails. Or IF find the old email and if it was random/trash enough, and you are lucky.... it has expired, been deleted, and you could 'recreate' it. Also - from what you quoted to complain about- "If you are here because you don't know the email but 'can log in' -YMMV with this - You can also 'fake' purchase a game on R* launcher / get to checkout screen/etc and it should show you the email tied to that account if that is all you need to jog your memory too." Again, this worked in the past - perhaps not now.

There are c / program files / rockstar games, c / program files x86 / rockstar games, c / programdata / rockstar games, and %appdata%/local/rockstar games if you wanted to experiment further and move/copy those to the new pc. As far as I know, the only information you want is in the my docs / rockstar games as mentioned above but not thoroughly tested this recently.

However, if you are already using a steam account, and opening the game through steam/steam created icon ----- it -should- already automatically be doing all this for you (through steam/api/connectivity/keys and no need for traditional credentials) and there should be zero reason for you needing a login/password, or require you inputting any of that information unless you are suffering some other permissions, vcredists, or connectivity issues - which 'could' be possible, but with out more details, who knows. I know the last time I logged into steam on a new pc, and tested gtav - it didn't request my login info. Granted, this was months ago - and recent launcher/social club updates may have tweaked that too. The users that prefer to keep steam closed, open the launcher, login via that, and do what they need - supplied the credentials. Which is exactly how my test on the 'clean' pc went (this one as well), I am required to supply login credentials on the launcher unless I'm launching through steam (I've not done it, so they don't show).

And yes, no one really likes 3rd party launchers. Yes many (myself included) dislike many of the hoops needed to resolve some issues, and could further streamline some things. I am familiar with your complaints, and many match my opinions - but hey, changes, 'security', blah blah. The joys of online drm, intermittent drm, accounts, and what not for -single player- games --- how else do they track achievements to compare with friends (who cares). Time to mark one of those password book pages as 'throwaways' - for future use.

Else, we delve into file monitoring/ memory reading, or other methods to explore the process of logging in to see which file/location is used to see if you can bare minimum undo/uncheck 'auto-login' in the launcher - ala autosignin.dat in my docs / rockstar games / social club - if they still use that. Something I won't be doing tonight, but might look at when I get bored in the future. Likely useless anyway without credentials saved/launching through steam.

----or, the obvious-
You've already seen the other link/info for contacting R*, if none of the above works.

/goodluck

[Hunu]

Originally posted by Red Star, Blood Moon:

I didn't use my real email when setting this up and because I was just trying to test the game I think I used some throwaway. I actually can get in on the one machine is how I finally figured out what I think my screen name is but I have no bloody clue what the password is or what email I used. The really aggravating thing is that I can actually just launch the game on the other machine, but the stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "social club" launcher that seems to automatically sign in when I launch through steam when I open it up it just gives me a blank email and password field. No nothing, no stored password, no email. So how do I figure out what my email is? How can I reveal my stored password? Failing that could I just clone the stupid launcher folder and download that directly onto my new system drive?

For emphasis: I do not know what the email is but I am sure it's not one I would've used before elsewhere and I don't think I wrote it down anywhere in my password bookthis is one of the many reasons why I hate third party launchers with a passion and HATE needing an account to play my games even more, Starcraft 2 is literally unplayable for this reason I think that's the only game I ever bought in my life I never got to play again, and also the last time I ever gave Blizzard money I could plausibly guess the password, but it might've been some random string too, I'm not sure what I used. Is there some settings file in the launcher folder I can just duplicate and install on my new PC? Althogh I suppose that doesn't actually fix the underlying problem...is there some way to go intot he "social club" launcher and force it to show password and email?

I don't know if such a thing exists, but you own the game... So if you happened to find a version that didn't require you to authenticate/login, then in theory you're not doing anything wrong by choosing to play that one instead.

Did you use a proper "temp email" service or a "throwaway" email account? Because if you made a throwaway account, you can just try and discover the name of that and either log back in to it, or if it no longer exists, make it again and log in that way. If it was a temporary email address you're probably ♥♥♥♥ out of luck trying to recover that way.

I haven't read your posts in depth, but did you try getting in touch with R* support? You're going to have some kind of CD-Key on Steam (I think) and you might be able to speak with support, send them screen shots/cdkey/whatever they might ask for to let you register a different email address to the account. A lot of people say they are useless, but if you have a "real" problem, in my experience they're pretty helpful, though it can be a lottery of course... Definitely worth trying a couple of times.

Final thoughts: The game is reaaaally cheap if you buy it from the right place so you could always just get a new copy of the game and put in a proper email address this time.

Good luck.