Steam Validation Rejected- In Offline???

[Lt.Green]

So yeah, as I've mentioned in another post, I don't have broadband at my house, I only tether my phone to it every now and then for recognizing manually applied updates, been at least 3 weeks since I fixed half life and started playing, suddenly this evening MS:C won't "establish a kingdom" for me, I get the loading bar and then just back at the main menu, opening console only nets this;

Setmaster unavailable, start a server first.
Net Ports: server 27015, client 27005
Server up address 127.0.0.1:27015
Game master spawned
STEAM validation rejected

I was playing just a few hours ago and as far as I'm aware didn't do anything terribly different... Other than having to kill MS:C in task manager every so many maps cause it froze, but that stuff happens all the time

Edit: Half Life and TFC will let me start games just fine, is there some special way MS:C handles hosting?

Edit2: Reinstalling MS:C does not fix, nor does rolling back or flat out deleting characters (figure that was longshot)

 

[Lt.Green]

So I got it working again for now by tethering up my phone and going online in steam, starting a map, loading character, everything seemed fine. Went back offline and it appears to be working for now, got lucky and none of my other games triggered for update too...

I'm gonna assume this will happen again at some point, but hope not... Is there maybe something about MS:C that sees if my last online loggin to steam is older than X amount of time and then gives me the bird, or is this just some wierd random fluke that will hopefully not occur again?

 

[Thothie]

Steam itself does this, and it hampers my development efforts when I'm in Internet dead zones, no end. Offline mode seems to expire, and it seems rather arbitrary about how and when it decides to do so.