As the title says, if Edit -> playback rate is set to anything other than 100% and i click play, EoF crashes. It happens on any song if I just start a new project and try to play it at a reduced speed. I'm using the latest hotfix, 5-3-2016

I'm not able to reproduce that problem. Does it happen regardless of whether the "time stretch" feature is enabled? Does it happen with all of the built-in playback speeds as well as any custom playback speed you set? Did it happen with any other recent hotfixes? Does it happen on previous projects you've worked on, or just new projects?

This is my first time using EoF so it was only on new projects, and I'd never used previous versions, but turning off time stretch fixed it. What does time stretch do anyway?

It manipulates the audio to compensate for the affects of playing the song back at less than full speed so that it still sounds like the normal pitch.  It might be worth checking EOF's log to see if it shows any problems there.  It's also worth re-downloading EOF 1.8RC11 and trying that version (without latest hotfix), to see if it works better for you.  After RC11 I pursued updates and optimizations for a third party library (FFTW) used for the time stretch stuff.  If RC11 works without issue, if you can check the latest hotfix I just posted, let me know if that causes crashes again.  The newer FFTW may not work well on some computers.