Thanks for the tip! So Steam authentication seems to be working now, pointing to an issue with steam at the time of the problem. I thought for sure it had to be something else because one of the people I was trying to play with is also in my house and was connecting to multiplayer perfectly fine at ...

So I bought the game through Steam a while back, played it maybe once solo and am only now trying to play some multiplayer with friends through Steam.

When attempting to join their newly created world, my game client goes through "Connecting To The Game" and then "Logging in with Steam" where ...