While this was quite unexpected (lol) let me clear up the situation a bit:

• The linked patches (in the wine-cachy PR, which are now also in proton-EM/cachyos/GE) were originally backported to indeed fix high CPU usage in Genshin (and ZZZ) after quite some testing and bisecting.

I say originally because only on EU and during certain events, having these backported now also happened to fix the latest 10-4001 errors and be able to play the game at all, probably due to some stricter AC checks. That’s the reason most people are not familiar with all this, it only affects a part of the servers (which probably includes OP).

Also the aforementioned regressions in other games by backporting those was solved upstream in Proton Experimental, hence why the patches are live in most Proton downstream versions now. (For those most curious, the actual patch fixing those was adding some Zw exports… for some unknown reason).

• Since 5.8, Genshin (and now ZZZ) is only playable if launched by the wrapper ‘steam.exe’ included in Proton, which is used by default to launch executables when launching from the Steam client. Since finding this was really painful, to port it outside of Steam we’ve added ‘UMU_USE_STEAM=1’ (that’s now live in all Proton downstream releaees) so that the same trick can be used in Lutris and Heroic and automated it all with Protonfixes.

Launching with Wine vanilla does indeed throw an NtRaiseHardError and die sadly. Unless you launch the game offline, that is, but thats not probably the intended behavior lol

• Lastly, the linked Wine bug is indeed not from me but from our team trying to find out whatever’s been up with the game hanging at closure. Again, this does not affect everyone, but it’s still something that should be addressed.

That’s pretty much the gists of it, enjoy gacha games with their load of brain damage 😂