I always think of this comic when I see this thread...

Just got around to testing it myself and that seems to make the difference, so get on your knees, bitch!

(Or you can go into Netzwerkverbindungen and just shut off your LAN connection from there).

In any case, if I'm connected when I go into offline mode, I seem to have less problems with games running in offline then if I do a sudden offline switch.

Recently the main ones were Skyrim (patch broke resistances) and Black Ops (patch introduced stutter bug). I am sure going back farther there were more. It only takes one to be super annoying.

Your argument seems to be "hey it's rare so fuck it" I guess. My argument is, give me power over my games please.

I will never go back again to games I regularly have to patch manually. And if you force patches onto gamers, it makes developers more careful in their programming work. No more "ah well, just crawl back to the earlier version".

It is generally easier to just fix the problem that occurred with a patch with a simple fix on that point and keep all the other improvements, then to completely go back another version.

I have full control over my Steam games. Whenever a game needs special care (which happens very rarely for technical reasons) then I can just meddle with the local files. And when I don't like gameplay changes it is usually easily modded.

I'm simply asking for a right-click menu option like "revert to original version," or even to just have "do not auto-patch" actually work so I can reinstall and not patch. Something like that. It would not be hard.

I don't hate steam.

I just don't buy games that have to be activated online. If after I purchased a copy of a game someone wants to have a say in whether I should play the game or not, then this is not a valid business model for me. And yes, that means I missed out on a lot of interesting looking games during the last decade or so. Can't be helped. You make decisions and live by them.

Since steam uses that kind of business model it didn't get any of my money. But it's the same with Origin and all that other stuff out there. The only service I do use is GOG, because here I do have sole and complete control over my copy of the game. And yes, the whole update affair is a bit inconvenient, but that is a price I gladly pay for my independence.