How to have reliable offline mode on Steam.

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MatDerKater (Banned) Jun 9, 2013 @ 5:01pm

How to have reliable offline mode on Steam.

First off, I despise being forced to use Steam or indeed any other kind of invasive 3rd party middle man DRM, but since I have been gifted some free games and have also been stupid enough to pay for a few games that require Steam, I guess I am stuck with it, at least asd far as those games are concerned.

I work offshore. I am offshore for 5 weeks at a time. When I go offshore, I take my gaming laptop with me, which I like to play games on. Because I have no internet connection when I am offshore, I set all the invasive and defiling DRMs such as Origin and Steam to "OFFLINE MODE". Yet with Steam, even though I opt to log in in "OFFLINE MODE", after just a week or so, the Steam client tells me "There is no records of this username on your computer, please enter your username and password" With no internet connection, this is a pretty hard thing to do.

So my question is, if anyone would be so kind as to answer it, how do I make Steam go into a geniune offline mode, whereby I really don't need an internet connections to access my games.

I make no aopologies for the sour tone of my post. When Steam locked me out of my games that were meant to keep me amused for 5 weeks, rendering my gaming laptop an 8Kg weight around my neck, I was spitting bloody venom!

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Showing 1-15 of 30 comments

schnitzeljaeger Jun 9, 2013 @ 5:42pm

AFAIK you have to set your system clock a while back...

Maj.Sabastian78 Jun 9, 2013 @ 5:45pm

Can you translate that for me? Did a quick search on my PC and it said nothing about system clocks.

Last edited by Maj.Sabastian78; Jun 9, 2013 @ 5:46pm

Felthrian Jun 9, 2013 @ 6:51pm

The clock itself, the one you see in the lower right hand corner - that is the time on your system, or your system clock.

Marble Jun 9, 2013 @ 9:55pm

Easiest way is to just not close Steam. Windows is mature enough to not require a reboot every 30 minutes and you can put it to sleep and start it up again instantly. Games will keep playing find if you were online, then you lose your connection. The actual "mode" for it seems broken.

Facedown Jun 9, 2013 @ 9:58pm

Off-line mode is designed to reset about every two weeks at which time you are supposed to go online again.

Marble Jun 11, 2013 @ 1:21am

Originally posted by MatTheCat:
Originally posted by facedown:
Off-line mode is designed to reset about every two weeks at which time you are supposed to go online again.

Seriously!?

Well Steam can downwell ♥♥♥ ram it. I wonder if bootleg versions of games, that I dont need to pay for, thus depriving developers of payment for their work, come laden down with such an issue?

Only if you're too poor for Internet, in which case you likely wouldn't be buying them anyway.

henryg Jun 11, 2013 @ 9:54am

Originally posted by facedown:
Off-line mode is designed to reset about every two weeks at which time you are supposed to go online again.

This is not actually true - Offline Mode is designed to be indefinite. You can't access any of Steam's online features such as friends lists or saved game synchronization, of course, but the client should allow you to run in Offline Mode for as long as you like.

That said, there are many components involved in Offline Mode, and some of them have known issues and bugs which we are continually working to improve. We're aware that it doesn't always work as flawlessly as we want it to, but please keep reporting bugs with Offline Mode. It is not broken 'by design'.

EDITED Nov 4 2013 - holy thread necro. Looks like Kotaku decided to link to this post from six months ago, and every game blog has copy-pasted it. The "two week" timeout issue has been fixed for months now, along with several other bugs. We're still working on improvements, and you might catch them if you read the patch notes carefully, but we don't bother to post on the forums every time we fix something (maybe out of fear that it will get posted as front-page news six months later?).

Last edited by henryg; Nov 4, 2013 @ 11:29pm

schnitzeljaeger Jun 11, 2013 @ 10:03am

An official response - my world is crumbling :D

Henry, why don't you communicate such things earlier when the forums/internets are full with offline issues?

Last edited by schnitzeljaeger; Jun 11, 2013 @ 10:04am

MatDerKater (Banned) Jun 11, 2013 @ 11:33am

Originally posted by henryg:
That said, there are many components involved in Offline Mode, and some of them have known issues and bugs which we are continually working to improve. We're aware that it doesn't always work as flawlessly as we want it to, but please keep reporting bugs with Offline Mode. It is not broken 'by design'.

But why does their need to be issues and bugs? Back in the day when most games did not require Steam or some other middle man DRM, games just worked. Internet connection or not.

If I have the games all installed on my laptops hard drive, I should have everything I need to play, internet connection or not. But because of Steam, I don't get to play without being online, even when I opt to use Offline Mode. It seems that Steam is the issue and the bug and the solution would be to get Steam out of the way between me and my games.

Mr. Gaiety Jun 11, 2013 @ 12:02pm

[/quote] It is not broken 'by design'. [/quote]

This is strange, since it HAS been broken for years before it was addressed of last year due to Windows shutting and Steam being unable to sync beforehand. Steam suppourt in terms of client stability and speed has always been known to be poor and not prioritized over other events, but why hasn't there been a way for offline mode to be automatic?

Look at Origin, despite it being hit with criticism, it's goes offline as soon as the internet is down without having to "boot" into any offline mode as you only need to log back in with the credentials it last recognized to be legitimate. Steam has the tendency (atleast for me) for offline mode to stop working at random intervals or whenever the client.blob file has been affected in any way.

Surely there is no reason to make it difficult for people to play their games freely?

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henryg Jun 11, 2013 @ 12:33pm

We have been working very hard on upgrading the underlying technology in Steam. We have no community managers or PR people, so all the time that we spend on forums is taking away from development time. That said, I know that it's frustrating to get no response, and it looks like we aren't doing anything about it.

Many of the older games on Steam were using an older authentication system which has many known issues with Offline Mode and is incredibly difficult to maintain - it was written for a time when there were dozens of games on Steam, not thousands. We are in the process of upgrading every game in the Steam catalog to a newer authentication system (and fixing bugs that result from the conversion), but this is a slow and time-consuming process. Some day soon, once this work is completed, we will eliminate the old authentication system (represented by the ClientRegistry.blob file) and Offline Mode should immediately become much more robust.

#11

Mr. Gaiety Jun 11, 2013 @ 1:23pm

Originally posted by henryg:
Some day soon, once this work is completed, we will eliminate the old authentication system (represented by the ClientRegistry.blob file) and Offline Mode should immediately become much more robust.

Thank you for taking the time to address this, it really helps elavate some of the concerns people had with Steam being a DRM platform since the reveal of the next-gen of gaming. Hopefully that will come to fruition. :)

#12

76561198030616898 Jun 12, 2013 @ 5:42am

There are rumored to be quite a few methods to make the offline mode last longer.
Changing the time was one method, the blop file, also the file winui.gcf might be involved (google that)

Originally posted by Canti:
Only if you're too poor for Internet, in which case you likely wouldn't be buying them anyway.

good one canti... mr lvl 41... you obviously aren't nor do you seem to hesitate when it's about "spending"..

Last edited by Jessi; Jun 12, 2013 @ 5:42am

#13

aiusepsi Jun 13, 2013 @ 11:26am

Originally posted by Jessi:
also the file winui.gcf might be involved (google that)

Steam doesn't actually use winui.gcf any more. That'd be one of the improvements to the underlying Steam technology that Henry was talking about.

#14

swenor Jun 27, 2013 @ 3:51am

I found this somewhere in the forums:

yes all you have to do is go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam when you are in steam then click your right mouse button and new text document when you are there you'll paste this

BootStrapperInhibitAll=enable
ForceOfflineMode=enable

be sure to name that text document steam.cfg

hope it helps you atleast it works for me

I can confirm it works. Test it first to avoid issues (just in case).
If you keep that steam.cfg in your steam installation directory then steam will always log in automatically in offline mode. If you remove/rename that file Steam will show login box.

Last edited by swenor; Jun 27, 2013 @ 3:52am

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Date Posted: Jun 9, 2013 @ 5:01pm

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