Forum

probably because of http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=784745

“After the dust settles, we believe we’ll have a better implementation of Steam than ever — more computing resources offering us more headroom to implement a more robust solution, and a platform to offer even more features and performance.
Since June, we’ve been working on moving and expanding Steam’s core server infrastructure. This effort includes replacing and upgrading the network infrastructure, adding additional disk and CPU capacity, and physically moving the Steam servers.
All of the infrastructure build-out is complete; the servers have their new home and the new network infrastructure is up and running. We’re in the process of physically moving the existing servers to join the new servers, and migrating the network connections from the old location to the new location.
We’ve got a plan in place that minimizes the amount of downtime required to complete this work. In fact, until yesterday, we’d managed to do everything without any effects that were visible to our users. Starting today, we’re actually changing the routing and location for our outbound Internet connections. This work is intended to be as noninvasive as possible.
As we move the network connections and reconfigure, we expect a series of short outages today; nothing more than a few minutes each.
As we finish moving the servers next week, we’ll be down for maintenance a little more often than normal. Usually, we push new code to the servers once a week, causing a five- to ten-minute outage. The week of August 30, we expect to be down three or four times for similar durations.
Finally, after this work is done, we’ll have the twice-annual database maintenance window. This time, we’ll be using the window to move database load to the new machines and storage we’ve purchased.
Now that the customer-visible work is starting, I’ll try to keep this thread updated with notes about our progress and changes to our plans.
After the dust settles, we believe we’ll have a better implementation of Steam than ever — more computing resources offering us more headroom to implement a more robust solution, and a platform to offer even more features and performance.

Thanks for your patience!”

Been happening to me for months too, pretty inconsistent about when it decides it’s gonna do it or not but when it does happen it’s pretty much always on the first connect after loading up tf2. I’m just grateful that no clan servers ever have the “steamid already in use/validation rejected” problem.

same for me

Been having the same issue on css and tf2 for months now. Just join a shit server that i dont care about first and then hope the 2nd connect to the actual clan server doesn’t time me out too. if it does i get the steam validation rejected. If that happens i just ask someone to kick me through console and its sorted.

ok, so far we found out that actually more players than expected have this issue.

and we also have some stuff to do about it when it already happened.

but is there any chance to find a way to prevent the whole disconnect error message bullshit >.< im afraid not.. i guess it is once again up to valve to fix it "sooner or later" (what means "later or never" in real time). :(

Using a thomson router by any chance?

Anyone else STILL having this fucking rediculous problem? Every time i load tf2 up, i have to connect to dm_store and run in circles until i get the validation problem before i can go and play wherever it is i wanted to play.