Family Sharing Multi-Player with 2 copies

[carolynandjeremy]

I have been unable to find an answer anywhere to this question.

If I want to play a game in multi-player mode with my family, who shares my library, can I do it IF I BUY TWO COPIES OF THE GAME? I know you can't play together with only one copy of the game - makes sense (and yes, I know about offline mode). But also if one of my kids is playing any game and I start playing on a different computer (neither offline), it kicks them off. So I'm trying to find out if I can buy two copies of a game and play with them if they don't have independent accounts. Or can you actually play multi-player using offline mode?

Any help with this would be appreciated. I don't mind buying a second copy, but I do if it still isn't going to allow me to play with them.

[carolynandjeremy]

So it looks like I can't even buy a second copy of the game. So the answer to that question is that I can't do it. I will check to see if I can buy a copy under one of my kids' accounts.

[Eldin]

Just buy second copy of the game on second account and you'll be able to play multiplayer together.

If you want to only play LAN, you can do it with only one licence.
Launch Steam on all computers and disconnect your router from the internet.
Now you'll be able to launch any game on any PC without kicking others.
Just launch the same game, one person should be a host and others should join.

[Kargor]

Even if you DO have two licenses, Steam doesn't treat them like that in any way. It treats your licenses as "yes/no", without looking at the count.

[carolynandjeremy]

So I bought a second copy of the game I'm currently interested in (Portal 2) on my daughter's account and set her up as a "friend." I can invite her to a Coop game, but all she gets is a notification in the chat - there's nothing for her to actually join the game. And then I show up offline to her when she searches. This is on 2 PCs on the same network at my house.

I have family library sharing on for my account. Do I need to unshare my library first and then try again? I guess I could just try a bunch of things and see if anything works, but surely I can't be the only person who has ever wanted to play a game with family members in the same house without having to jump through hoops like disconnecting my router from the internet. I'm usually pretty good at figuring these things out, but am at a loss here - must be missing something simple. And there's very little written on Steam family library sharing.

Any help would be appreciated. I was going to just let this thread die, since I appear to have a different setup than a lot of people. But I decided that if I can get it figured out, other people could save some headache when trying to do the same thing.

[999999999]

"Game Details" in your profile privacy settings must be "friends only" or "public" as it is a known bug (since last April) to invite properly.

[carolynandjeremy]

I checked and "Game Details" was set to "friends only". I can send an invite to her and she gets a chat message saying I invited her to play, but we can't see any way for her to join the co-op game. I have now unshared my library (turned off family sharing) and we're still having the same issue. For some reason my computer shows her as online but her computer shows me as offline - very weird. I wonder if her computer seeing me as offline is why we can't play.

Is there some live chat or phone support with Steam that I could work this out with?

[carolynandjeremy]

Wow, just figured it out and it was stupid. Even though I don't remember ever setting it, my "Friends" status was set to Invisible. Changed it to Online everything worked fine. Thanks for all of the help.