I am just curious how reliable the Steam offline mode is. Some here report that it works sometimes, other says it don't. All in all it doesn't give the impression of a 100% reliable service.

Regarding consumer rights I wish somebody would actually sue Steam and clarify their terms of service - how much of it is actually allowed under our law and how much not.

But overall I just give Steam a penalty for having a risky DRM scheme, risky for the customer. So they must have lower prices to convince me. Well they convinced me although less often than GOG.

Steam's offline mode is reliable as long as you take care when using it. It's annoying really, and a bug I hope gets fixed as soon as possible - basically, if you really want Steam's offline mode to actually work (and I'm told that even then it doesn't always work, altho I'm yet to see that for myself,) you have to:
a) Launch all the games you want to play offline while still online
b) manually switch Steam into offline mode
c) turn off Steam before you turn off your computer - don't allow windows to do it for you. It's going to work most of the time, but if Steam doesn't exit properly, there's a chance it'll try to update on the next launch, thus breaking offline mode
d) ... pray to god power doesn't cut out

That's the way I found offline mode to always work. Most of the time, it works as it should - when you try to start Steam offline, you get prompted whether you want to use offline mode and if you pick the option, it'll launch offline. However, this method gets broken often enough for me to follow the steps I have described above when I want to be sure it'll work - it's bloody annoying tho.

I would say Steam client has changed a lot since that 5 months offline steam time i had, for once , there were no client updates for a long time back then but now there are frequent updates every week or so , i think anyone expecting to go offline for long periods should sign out of the client beta updates, turn off update checking etc in the client

btw. I never had problems with offline mode on steam too. And I use it quite frequently. The only downside is it doesn't store your playtime locally, and for most games achievements don't work, but apart from that - never had any problems.

It doesn't matter if I manually changed to offline or I just lost my connection during play, never had any problems. Except for scheduled updates, but it seems they fixed that a some time ago (client updates, not game updates). Also, it's very nice that steam just launches in offline mode if you don't have any connection present.

It was a little pain in the ass when previously you had to wait like several minutes for steam to finally give up on trying to connect and to give you an option to go to offline mode - changing that is a big convenience improvement.

To be honest, I'll let it be known I just had a nice experience. On a hostel I was staying at recently (as in, last week), I switched on my laptop and just played the new tomb raider on steam, which I had downloaded (and presumably started up) but didn't have time to play. I beat the game, and I remember thinking how nice it was that I was not bothered by achievement popups and the like.

It was only a few days later when I realized that steam was capped on the hostel and it therefore had launched on offline mode. The browser still worked, so I could check the stores and sales, but I couldn't download games and TR was set to having played 0 hours (this is what made me notice in fact). The achievements remain however.

When it works, it works beautifully. If it wasn't for those "server not available so you can't play your game" moments even when started on offline...

Approximately how often do you have such moments?

Depends on how often I play steam games at any given time, but during steam heavy times about twice a week on average I'd say.

Well, not that exact message, just the standard "your games are not available" crap. The server unavailable during offline only happened once, also last week.

I guess I never noticed that new feature where steam would go off-line automatically. I always thought you had to log in to steam and change it to offline mode. I was thinking it would be nice if Steam automatically stuck you as offline on your last connection and then periodically (once a day) check offline status for updates. I should never have a problem playing offline, unless I have been offline for a few weeks or more. Which two weeks is fine for me, but I understand those without an internet connection may need a longer offline mode.

With how Mcdonald's, Starbucks and hotels are providing free wifi, I don't see how a two week limit is a problem. Stroll to your nearest free wifi provider and update the steam client and go offline once again.

it never was like that. Before the update, it could take a few minutes for steam to finally give up trying to connect to allow you to go to offline mode, though.

Oh, I forgot about you dinosaurs. I guess you may have a problem lugging your desktop to a starbucks, but I have seen pictures online of people dragging their desktops around.

Simple, stroll to your nearest wifi provider casually carrying your pc, monitor, keyboard, mouse and required cabling. Find the nearest wall socket and plug everything in. Casually like.

Trust me, nobody will even notice.

Maybe in US. As far as I can tell, elsewhere where I've tried it, the hotels normally charge for wifi (ie. you have to order it from them, charged on top of your room bill), and Starbucks etc. offer it only to paying customers. Then again, I don't sleep at Hiltons.

I once tried the "free" (ie. only for customers) wifi in one McDonald's in Bangkok, and I couldn't connect to anywhere with it. Either it was down, or overloaded. Thanks for nothing.

Yesterday (or was it the day before) when I was at the BKK airport, I saw WLANNET posters on the walls advertising free wifi. Great, I thought, I could connect to internet with my tablet while waiting for my flight. Umm, not quite that easy, they required you to first go to some place at the airport and register there with your name, and then you'd get one hour of free wifi. I didn't feel like doing it.

And when I go outside urban areas, there's even less possibility of free wifi. Anyway, I bit the bullet and bought a prepaid data SIM, which gave an ok 3G mobile connection on urban areas, and slow 2G/GPRS/EDGE connection elsewhere. It wasn't that cheap though, and it had a 4 gigabyte/month data transfer cap.

Actually, it's the cheaper hotels that usually offer the free wifi, and it can be a little slow if they don't have a basic login with password. The more expensive hotels charge for everything. I don't go to starbucks, but if it's for paying customers that is understandable...buy one of their cheap ($20) coffees and you are set.
My favorite hotel to leech used to be the Choice Hotels properties. They usually didn't have a wifi password and you could park nearby and download something while away from home. Now it seems all the hotels are putting a basic password on their wifi.

Well here's another case of steam things not working as advertised, my wine prefix with a bunch of single players games set up for offline mode failed.. Exactly a month after I set it to offline mode (I've started keeping records).

And Just to rub salt into my wounds, having re-authenticated I discover that despite all games being set to not update this took out HL2:EP1 and HL2:EP2 which now read Update paused in the status column.

Again Valve override at their whim.

(and I just let them start to update to see how much it would take.. 2GB combined that 25% of my monthly download usage to fix two games that were working fine!).