luckily i made a backup before trying this, Origin just looked at the files i moved and overrode them anyway with masseffect 3. i had to buy a new hard drive, every service but origin and the widows store i was able to pull the games from my back up drive, at least origin not crashing in a loop anymore.
update it's now saying i don't own any of the dlc even the free dlc.
When I did the method stated in this thread, Origin used the same game folder but instead of overriding the files, it just added on to them with the same files, so the folder is now double in size.
Sometimes, If you are quick enough, you can stop the crashing loop by selecting the updating game in the bottom left corner and quickly cancel it as soon as Origin loads. This is actually nothing important because you can just reinstall the client as easly and follow the proper steps mentioned above.
We shouldn't have to do this in order for this to work. Locating a game should just work. EA needs to get on the ball if they want to release a new launcher. Epic sucks with this issue even more since they don't even have an option to locate game files. This is why Steam is beating the crap out of every one of these launchers. You can locate, move and do whatever the hell you want with those files. If this post is old (since they didn't feel the need to put anything other than a month on their forum) then damn..but I've only recently been having this issue so maybe it's not. Anyways, thanks to @EA_Darko for a fix at least. But still.. fix the actual problem lol..
