I personally don't give that much thought or care toward privacy (I've long since stopped believing that privacy on the internet is an attainable thing), but I DO care a whole deal about functionality. And that's where Steam outshines Origin by an order of magnitude.

Maybe. But I still remember when Steam was forced down my throat back in the HL1 days. It was way crappier than Origin and this means there is hope.
Origin is basically a year old, Steam is ancient in age compared to it.

On top of that much of the "functionality" of Steam is useless to me (others may think different but I use about 10% of the features that Steam has and I'm basically a hardcore Steam user with tons of games and signed in daily...)

Also only balance can keep thinks level. The more strong platforms there are the better for us gamers.

" If you lose connectivity without Steam running you're not out of luck.
You may be able to go into offline mode but it might depend on if steam was once started in offline mode"

I don't wish to become embroiled in any form of argument on this forum but I would like to say that my recent experience is different. I simply could not get online and therefore could not put steam into offline mode. Believe me I tried all ways I could but either I'm consistently "unlucky" or steam was at fault. There is a third option that I must acknowledge but disagree with, that I am too stupid to work out how to do the necessary.

I do of course acknowledge there are probably sound business reasons for the current system employed by 1c, not least perhaps piracy prevention, and I want there to be sound flightsim businesses.

The OP is understandably frustrated about steam from my perspective. I know the irritation and sense of injustice stemming from the reasonable belief that I own a single or multiplayer product (or is it a license?) that for whatever reason, I am prevented from using.

I suspect this is not necessarily steam's intention and that there is either a fault or a poorly publicised and implemented system I have failed to use.

Septic.

steam has no effect on piracy...their are work arounds and the like for steam games that allow you to run them with out steam, bypassing all security...

Let me re-phrase my statement: The feature is there and yes, it's not a joke. It's supposed to work and works on all of my machines and my friends machines as well. Nothing is perfect though so it's perfectly plausible that it might not work for you but it's NOT intended and it's not necessarily Steams fault as you don't even know the reason. In other words: while Steam was causing trouble for you now it might also have been the game, your OS, your system configuration or whatnot.

In theory and for 99% of the people it works though. And I'm sure you did it right since there's nothing else to do than clicking on the button saying "Offline mode". It's probably just a bug.

You could try to get into contact with the support or check if there are logs. I don't experience Steam crashes.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not a Steam fanboy. I really dislike it. I just have a ton of games and use it daily since there's only a few alternatives. Hence I only reported that it has that feature and that it works. :P

And that is/was false because exactly that was not possible yesterday.
That´s the reason why there where so über-many complaining posts.

Your actually the only one in Germany I heard so far that had no connection problems yesterday.

Thanks for that info too!!!

Didnt know it.

S!