It's very unlikely Valve will ever tell users how to stay offline permanently, it's completely against their ads policies. You won't find those infos in any official docs, ever, as Valve wants users to stay online indefinitely.

Huh? Sorry but this is pure misinformation, no account will ever be banned for being offline too long.

I'm not a PC player, but can someone tell me why steam is used at all? Most people seem to hate it.

Good way to get games.
Bad way to play them.

:rofl:

Good way to protect against second hand sales.

Annoying as [censored] for people who brought the game new.

Oh wow the conspiracy theories in this thread is insanely amusing.


... but how can you play anything if you are going to get deployed?

Took me a while to figure out who you were talking about.

Army. We got Artillery to Delta force, infantry to heli piolts, tanks to doctors, and better yet! The best damn Airborne in the world. :toughninja:

So no, not the Airforce. :stare:

You will get banned because they deliberately placed a system so you can't be offline for too long, and you deliberately used an outsider's help to bypass this procedure. The set of instructions above isn't the official method to remain offline permanently- it's a hack to bypass an existing loophole, one that can easily be fixed later on. If caught, you're guaranteed to get banned, so many Skyrim gamers will not risk that and simply login online each time they play their game, or login online every several days if they're using the temporary offline mode. Maybe you don't mind having to go online to login to your account as well as update your steam client application every couple of days at least, but for the majority of PC gamers, it's quite a hassle.

I believe Bethesda is applying damage control here. People like you are ignorant on how steam actually works, thinking you really can play Skyrim offline properly, without risk of your steam account getting banned, or this current loophole is never noticed by steam and later a mandatory patch fixes it.

I know this might sound like an expensive solution but have you considered buying a console? I own a gaming PC and an xbox and switch between both for different things

I had an account offline for years, unused. It's still active.

And how is this a loophole?
You just basically flip some switches, there's no third party program or even a rewrite of an ini file, this is all about supported Steam options.

Please, stop spreading false and misleading infos, you obviously don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. It's not a "hack" by any means, those are settings you find in the client itself, there are no external programs involved. You can't be banned for being offline too long nor for tweaking the settings of the client itself. FYI, before upgrading my rig my Steam client has been offline for 6 [SIX] years and my account is still alive and kicking.

Um... the source of my info as to how to keep steam in offline mode came from their help faq.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGCB-2555

As long as you follow these steps, and dont install any other game unless you have internet access, it will never try and update your info and lock you out because it cant.

SEALs are better.

We dont appreciate you spreading lies.

Take steam out of your startup menu. It's obviously coming on because your allowing it to in some way. If you never turn it on in any way you won't have any problems. I have a few steam games.. I've never had to log onto steam to play them. Simply use a shortcut straight to the game exe.

If you don't know how to take it out of your startup simply type msconfig in your programs directory or if using xp in the run menu. click the startup tab.. scroll through the menu until you find steam. Uncheck it and restart your computer. No more steam.

Launching a Steam game starts Steam in the background. They should follow the "pure offline mode" or whatever steps that have been posted.

simple quit the navy

That's very nice of them but what I meant is that it's unlikely they'll ever clearly tell you that you actually *can* set it to stay offline permanently and just forget about it. For instance, the "forced" offline mode which is set when the internet connection is down is not a true offline mode, as the client will eventually check for updates every one and then, as my Wireshark tests highlighted, and this isn't written anywhere in their faq.

You can go to a Gamestop and just by the GFWL version and problem solved.

Huh..? This is completely wrong. In no way you can't prevent Steam from running when you launch a Steam-ed game. Unless you are not talking about cracked executables..

Wrong. Skyrim is going to be Steamworked no matter where you buy it.