With Steam's new multi-user login feature in Big Picture, "Offline mode" setting is now per-user. Due to do this, Steam doesn't know until a user logs on if should be in online mode or offline mode. Once login occurs, that user's offline mode setting is used.
Steam could stop checking for new versions once a user who wants offline mode has logged on. Would that solve your request? It would still check before login occurs.
Hmm - wouldn't it make more sense to invert the logic, or rather extend it it by one further constraint: Only start doing version checking when a user logs in in online mode, and suspend while any user is logged in in offline mode.
I mean, on the face of it what you're saying sounds fairly reasonable and is definitely a big improvement (no more requests being sent for the duration of being logged in in offline mode, thus heeding the explicit user request that offline mode constitutes), but it sounds like in the common single user case you might see a race between the version check and the completion of log-on after client start.
I'd argue that the user expectation is that no communication occurs until log-on in online mode. I can also see the case for the inversion of that, i.e. "communicate at will unless explicitly told otherwise by logging on in offline mode", but I think it's less likely that this matches the expectation of most users.
Edit: Edited for clarity; had a clunky meaning-bending typo in the first paragraph.
Thanks for your input / ideas. We want Steam to download an update even if there is no user logged in. Maybe this is a way to address it: if the last user that logged in wants offline mode, don't start a background update. If then a different user logs on who wants online mode, start the download then.
I.e. basically the model outlined above, with the added exception that if the last login was for online mode, it's allowed to do background downloads even without any user logged in - yes, I think that's a reasonable compromise that's acceptably predictable to users, at least to me. Sounds good!
Nothing extracted yet.
In recent weeks I've noticed that even in "Offline mode", the client continues to contact Valve servers to check for newer client versions and offers to download them.
While I understand a desire to ensure that the user runs a current client version, I believe the spirit of and user expectation for "Offline mode" is that the client won't "phone home". The version check should therefore be deferred until the user explicitly exits offline mode and connects to the service again, allowing the user more control over client behavior.