CoD: Black Ops has been plagued with stutter since release but after last week's patch I finally had smooth performance in singleplayer. Not perfect, but smooth enough to play the game. With yesterday's patch though it is now more stuttery than it has EVER been before to the point it is basically unplayable.

If this were not a Steamworks game with auto-patching I could roll back to the previous patch. I can't though, because Steam does not have that option.

Wow, this convenience sure is inconvenient!

You can tell Steam not to update.
Right click on a game in your library.
Click on Properties.
Click on the Updates tab.
Pick "Do not automatically update this game.'

So?

First off when online it will patch when you launch anyway. Second off that does diddly-squat as to rolling back to the previous patch.

The "Do Not Automatically Update" option sometimes turns back on with a few of my Steam games. It would be very annoying if I didn't want the new version yet, have told it not to update, and it does anyways, causing my saves to no longer work.

I believe it turns on every time Steam updates. So you need to keep checking it to make sure it's off.

SV: it shouldn't update automatically if you're on-line. Or do you mean if you fire up multiplayer?

The whole auto-patching thing would be much less of a pain in the arse if they just offered a roll-back function.

In my experience turning off auto-updates just means it won't download them randomly when Steam puts the patch up. It still makes you update when you try and launch the game though. This might have changed since I last experienced it though, I can't really say.

It's completely not the point of the thread though, the point is I can't go back to using patch 2, now that I have updated I am required to use patch 3.

Understood, SV. Yeah, not being able to roll back stinks. I was just wondering if there was another 'feature' of Steam that I'd missed. Seems I may have.

Indeed. If they had a right-click menu where you could pick which version to run that would be splendid. They don't allow this though, one assumes because they don't want you to have that kind of control.