Steam dodged a major bullet regarding Steam Guard

So for a time last year, when Steam Community pages upgraded to require “all the modern web standards,” The login page was completely inaccessible to people on older devices trying to run the Steam Mobile app for Steam Guard. Fortunately they built in a redundancy that the authenticator associated to your account can be used while logged out and shows in the login page.

Here’s a chicken and egg situation: In case you lose access to being able to remove an authenticator by logging in, you cannot make a new device a new autheticator because it’s only able to support one device at a time. You cannot remove an authenticator over the web without contacting support, you have to login to the original device to remove the authenticator.

See where the problem lies? If you get a new device that supports modern web standards, but the old device still needs to login and it’s using ancient versions of Gecko/WebKit… That simply doesn’t work.

Well… Fortunately that changed, and Steam now has a legacy fallback (or downgraded the web standards) for the login page. Older devices are able to login again and I was able to transfer my autheticator to another device.

Had the login page not changed, it would have been impossible to remove the authenticator without contacting Steam Support.

3 Likes

If you copy your program files/steam folder and your users/appears/local/steamfolder to another PC you can by pass steamguard as long as you already signed into the original PC and know the username pass

Handy for when you don’t wanna bother with steam guard

Well, the problem is less that I can’t access the account, it’s more that if someone loses access due to hardware failure of the device the autheticator is on, there’s no choice but to contact support.

Google Authenticator and Authy is far better in that regard.

1 Like

Does steam still require online access every 2 weeks?
It used to be, if you are offline for a while, set the date back to within a week or two of last remote connection, and Steam will start…

Not sure if it still works like that

Offline mode with no phoning home (Pull the network cable) has worked for months personally. Though if the tokens are still time based, it could still decide to expire if there’s an internal clock.

1 Like

They used to time out, and require authentication.
Like, steam would refuse to start if it had not contacted mothership.

Offline mode seems to be good without network connections. I left a Windows 7 SSD disconnected (hadn’t used it in 6+ months) and went back to it with no network and launched Steam in offline mode to get access to MAGIX Vegas 14 and it was fine.

Nice! thanks man

This is an aside but also a specific steam login trap.

I use the Steam Controller a lot, for my mini PC it is the main input device. I can when everything cooperates use the PC with only the controller, no mouse or keyboard connected.

Though…

Steam Controllers on windows need the Steam Client to be running to work properly. They have a “lizard mode” but it is flawed somehow.

The problem is that windows will not accept mouse input from the controller on certain windows (possible privilege related) but one of these windows is the:
“Steam cannot connect would you like to retry or use offline mode”
The controller cannot click the offline mode button or close the window, so you are stuck with a half functioning controller which will work for some things but cannot clear that steam window and is not fully featured.

Once Steam starts all the mappings and configurations load.

Here is the catch, on Linux the controller, well… controller is separate from the steam client, it is a kernel level type thing I think, either way that does not need login and just starts. I would love if they separated the two in windows version too as it would make the controller useable everywhere all the time, rather than just a thing for games, which is what they were pitching it as originally anyway.

1 Like