Is there a way to stop Steam from going offline without me explicitly telling it to do so?

I have Steam set to launch on demand (i.e., not start on startup). Sometimes, after I launch a game like Torchlight 2, which also launches Steam, it somehow fails to connect and dumps itself into offline mode. Well, one option is for me to check that it's online every time it's launched. This method, however, is tedious and prone to human forgetfulness; there is also the fact it sometimes goes offline randomly during a session. It also seems to me that once it goes offline (against my will), it doesn't come back online automatically? (could be wrong here). Anyway, in my case, I've had to open up Steam, go to File->Go Online.. to switch it back.

The reason I want to do this is for games like Torchlight 2, you can't earn achievements when Steam is offline. I found this out the hard way.

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2 Answers

From what you say, i understand that you open torchlight shortcut and then it opens steam. If this is the case, you should open steam separately and leave it online, then open the desired game ( Torchlight 2 in your case ) and it should work fine. If it goes offline mode on its own it's a network issue and you should check your internet connection.

EDIT:

I thought it's obviously that those issues are the result of a poor internet connection. Perhaps you can try :

1. Exit steam. Delete everything from steam folder except steamapps folder and steam.exe file. Relaunch steam and it will make all the updates again (it will take a while) and check if it acts the same.

2. Try a complete reinstall or steam (you can save the steamapps folder somewhere on your HDD so that you don't have to download every game again or lose save games etc.

Other than that it's purely an internet issue.

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The reason steam is going offline is because you are losing connection. This is frequently sometimes caused by laptops in sleep/pause mode as well as by a poor internet connection. Unfortunately, steam will not always come back on when you want it to. The best way to solve this is first to figure out whether the steam disconnects is being caused by sleep mode or by a bad internet connection. If it is the former, try adjusting laptop settings between pause/turnoff/sleep on laptop close, as you want the wifi connection to turn off at the same time as the laptop stops running rather than before (if it turns off before, steam may think you lost connection and get confused). If its the latter you have other issues outside the scope of the question.

Of course, if what you are describing is quite rare it could just be steam outages.