[wlesieutre]

Last year I had a few weeks between real internet connections at my house, and it really drove home how bad an idea these systems are. Even Steam, which ostensibly has an "Offline Mode" did not do as well as I'd have liked because one of the residents didn't have it set to log in automatically.

So now we're in a situation where all of her games refuse to open and we won't be back online for a while. But you'd think Steam would have no problem authenticating through a tethered EDGE connection. It's not a ton of data, and it doesn't need low latency. But it didn't work. Even if webpages loaded (albeit not quickly), Steam would not log in.

So it strikes me as incredibly arrogant for companies like EA and Ubi to come along and tell me that these always online systems aren't a problem. They are. And it sucks how many users accept them. Even when we're not talking about days/weeks like I discussed above, small Comcast outages here are not uncommon, and it's crazy that games will quit or entirely refuse to run when they happen.

I absolutely agree that they should have seen the reaction coming. The same kind of systems have been in place with games like StarCraft 2 and Assassins Creed, and they've all gotten similar receptions on sites like Reddit.

[redthrowaway]

It's interesting that you had issues launching Steam games without an Internet connection. I've never had a problem with it, although I've got a MBP and so my library of games is quite limited. Might the issue have not been Steam, but rather something the game publishers had included that caused it not to work?

[wlesieutre]

If you have Steam set to remember your password and log in automatically, it's fairly reliable. If you prefer to not leave passwords remembered, Steam will not launch even in Offline Mode until you restore the connection and authenticate. This is by design.

http://i.imgur.com/NXCpk.png

While I understand the reasons for designing it this way, it's still very annoying to be caught off guard by it. I'm glad that nobody could get access to any actual account data like my friends list, time played, etc. But I'd much rather it be a system like the Mac App Store, where software will run no matter what once it's been downloaded, and running things I've installed is entirely separate from my account authentication and anything with personal information in.