Introversion

I installed and tried to run Defcon on my home PC. I got the message 'key invalid' and that it was now running in 'demo mode'.

This's a mirror thread of one I posted on the steam forums just for coverage, I made a new thread just to draw attention to this new 'idea'/'observation'

I'm sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I created a new thread because most of the others appear to be mainly a drowning of "I have this problem too".

I have ran this game before in the past but since deleted it from my computer; in this time frame however I had also played it at work.

After sending a support ticket to Steam and also posting on the Introversion forums (and being passed between the two sites by both tech supports - the introversion site now links to a steam forum page that's dead) I have happened upon an observation.

I realised that at work I still had an authkey file from when I used to play it there. The debug.txt also listed it as working.

I re-installed Defcon at work and low, I got a 'key revoked' message. Steam then deleted the key and gave me a new one!

The key is now accepted. I backed up the file and deleted the authkey and all Defcon data, Steam now happily re-downloads/acquires the new key and verifies Defcon as working. I have yet to try the game at home to see if it accepts and automatically acquires this new key - but so far it seems happy.

So in light of this, it appears that the way Defcon and the Steam authorisation works is that if you have a 'redundant' key still associated with your account, it needs to invalidate or manually 'revoke' it before it'll issue you a new one (and it has to take this from an actual file/your client and not from what's stored remotely).

It's this 'catch' that is preventing people or at least me in this case, from playing the game and being issued demo keys as in part of the hand-shake process you're not giving the auth servers the old key so that it can revoke it and give you a new one (when the servers are expecting it).

As if to say 'oh, this isn't the key we're expecting from you (that we need to revoke), you're not legitimate' - have a demo key.

So if you've played elsewhere, try to get that authkey file, or at least, your old key.

I've yet to see whether or not this authkey , or in fact Defcon will work at home. I'm assuming it'll be transferrable automatically like it was to work.

An update;

So I returned home to my copy of Defcon.



So I then delete the Authkey - Steam sits on 'requesting authentication' for ages.



I copy over the Authkey with the one that successfully downloaded at work (this is all done today).

Authentication goes straight from 'unknown' to 'accepted'



So while at work; I had my old key which was revoked. I was then given a valid new one at work. At home I can't retrieve my new key nor can I get out of demo mode, but it accepts the Authkey file that I used at work.

Details of debug.txt from work just before key was revoked


So there's evidently a problem in key retrieval; key revokation's working though. Auth server connectivity has issues.