Steam offline mode = pointless?

despotofmidnor

despotofmidnor

despotofmidnor

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Joined
10 Sep 2008
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583
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Macclesfield, U.K.
hi guys.
Basically my friend has moved into a flat and he wont have internet for another month.
All of his games are on steam.
He goes to play on 'offline mode' and it says you cant do that.
I looked into it and basically the only way you can go into offline mode is to be connected to the internet and tell it to start in off line mode, but only if your connected to the net.
He has auto sign in on and you cant open steam up to turn this off unless you log in first and then turn it off, which is the other way to go offline mode...

Just wanted to point out how much of a useless feature this is, unless you set up before hand. I can imagine this really messing up a LAN party.

Any of you had this problem/know of a fix i havnt found?
 
I've often gone straight to offline mode without logging in on my NC10 to play casual games.

I thought you only had to configure for offline mode once on the machine, then it will allow you to play offline multiple times.
 
You have to get the actual steam box open first (with your game list, friend list etc)
Then you tell it to go offline, but hes never done offline mode before so it aint set up.
Thus he has about 4 games he can play as the rest are via steam.
 
It's far from useless. I use Steam's offline mode almost everyday.

It's hardly shocking that it requires online authentication before allowing offline mode - otherwise pirates could just download every single steam game and play them in offline mode!
 
Ive used it quite a few times. I seem to remember it would give you a time limit of a few days for playing offline, and youd need to connect after that. But things could be different now.
 
He's in Manchester, non one we know has a mobile internet dongle.
There are tons of wireless connections near by. He's checking them often for an unsecured, but so far no luck.
 
PhillyDee said:
Can one of you not get a mobile broadband dongle and start it up from that. Or drag the unit around to each others house?
Click to expand...

Yeah, why wont you help your mate?

Tell him to hook his mobile phone up to it and use it as a modem and stop being so blooming tight.
 
I can see why Steam actually utilises the feature to stop piracy but it is annoying as hell.

It was very annoying when at Uni because the University VPN in halls didn't allow any kind of gaming through it, so if I went home and played on a Steam game and forgot to set it to offline mode again, I couldn't play on it till i next went home and "activated" offline mode. Quiet annoying when you buy a game on the weekend and couldn't play it for 4 or 5 weeks :(
 
Subterranean said:
Ive used it quite a few times. I seem to remember it would give you a time limit of a few days for playing offline, and youd need to connect after that. But things could be different now.
Click to expand...

There's no time limit. Steam has been offline on my g/f's machine for a number of months now.
 
uv said:
It's far from useless. I use Steam's offline mode almost everyday.

It's hardly shocking that it requires online authentication before allowing offline mode - otherwise pirates could just download every single steam game and play them in offline mode!
Click to expand...

To be fair though, you do remember just how many problems offline mode caused for us at fragM LANs? :p
 
We are both on pay as you go mobiles, we already had the idea of the phone modem thing.
Is there anything that i can get hold of and take on a pen drive to him? Like a file he can replace?
 
When I went to Rome I took my laptop with me - the games already downloaded.

I was never on the internet there - I simply just double clicked Steam and selected Start in Offline Mode. It then gave me full access to my games.



M.
 
You are just doing it wrong. User error.


As long as the game is fully updated and has been played (and thus activated) at least once online you can go into offline mode and play it whenever you want.


It isn't complicated.
 
Just double checked. What I would do to test is:

Disable Network Cards so you have no connections at all
Launch Steam
Should get the box below:



Click Start In Offline Mode.
Job done. No Username. No Password. Just access to your games.



M.
 
We get that box and you click offline mode and it says
"an error connecting to the Steam network"
And when i look this up on the steam forums its because he aint connected to the internet or a network.
 
It's not pointless because your mate is a muppet. We use this at home all the time on our laptops, works great. I agree that it'd be nice to be able to set offline mode without having to be online though, but then again since a vast majority of Steam users know about the need to be online, that hardly makes it pointless or useless.
 
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