As you may or may not be aware, steam is down and has been for a few hours right now.

Cutting to the chase, it has shown me my folly in relying on a service which is so dependent on a connection being available to steam's servers.

Games bought on gog.com of course have no DRM and can be played forever with no worry about servers going down.

I look forward to gog.com's move into more recent games and competition with steam.

True story.

That said, you can run Steam games in offline mode and not need their servers. So only installation and patching are really effected.

Personally I always have Steam in offline mode because I find their online features to be slow and buggy. It takes MUCH less time for me to launch a game in offline mode than online. Also it prevents them from downloading insane shit to my PC without me authorizing it.

Never had any problems starting Steam itself - if you do get problems just try discconnecting your internet/modem and steam should boot up in offline mode by default (since it can't find a connection).

Offline mode also generally only works if you've run a game in online mode at least once; but otherwise you shouldn't have any problems outside of online/multiplayer

I can't play DNF multiplayer because of this. It said i need to log in to Steam. How can i log in to Steam if Steam itself was down the whole time?

This is good to know, because my games seem to take FOREVER to start up, even if it's just something like AvPC2K. I might try that.

Was never down for me but it was less responsive than usual. And I made the mistake of trying to purchase Tales of Monkey Island.

I got a "your purchase has not been completed" but Paypal shows the payment as completed. So now I must deal with Steam support. Yey!

Working fine for me. (Was talking to a friend on there up until 15 mins ago and I can explore the store.)

Funny, I could still play TF2, only the item server went down.

Meh.

**continues to list games on eBay**

Oh hmm... could be that they're readying their servers for the added demand of the Christmas sale.

While I agree there are problems with Steam's offline system which most people are also aware of, this thread is just flamebait.

What? Some can't diss steam if they want to? I mean it CAN be done in a civil manner you know. :\

Disclaimer: I actually like steam.

Oh god I can't log into my friends list, boo Steam!

I can confirm it's partially down for me. I can log in but I can't download any games or browse the store so it seems like they've brought the authentication servers back up but not the content servers.

Yeah, even with the cloud stuff turned off and the in-game interface off it can still sometimes just kind of hang there, thinking about launching the game. In offline mode it's usually instant.