So this would be a feature to set yourself apart from the competition :)

Maybe, if they felt there are enough people caring about the old patches and installers. I've seen the opposite too, e.g. in the gogrepo.py discussion some people wanted a feature which would download only the base installers, and never the patches (as they expect the base installer to be the updated version anyway).

I personally would like to see GOG moving into automating the generation of offline installers as much as possible, even if it means less (separate) patches or no patches at all. The standalone patches have always been somewhat painful and people want contradicting things from them: some want delta patches, some want incremental patches, sometimes the patches are not backwards compatible, sometimes it is not quite clear which patches exactly need to be installed on top of the base installer in order to get to a certain patch level, etc. etc.

Several days usually. For Spellforce 3 it was about one and a half day approximately (i.e. about 36 hours non-stop). On the first days the installers were updated once a day.
It is not a huge issue (I can use Galaxy for such frequent updating games and download backup when patching is over), but it will not hurt to keep files for a week or at least 3 days from creating a link to them.

I have read the thread, and i would like to thank everyone for the input :)
A couple of points were made that I want to adress, in no particular order:

- The day when GoG does not release any patches, only updated installers, will be the day when i fully stop buying games here
- Where to buy games if not here? You may call me a hypocrite, and maybe I am, but I will be buying my games on Steam if GoG versions are not properly maintained. I already have the steam client. Having a foot in the door is quite the advantage ;) I do not want to use any other clients, that is why I boycott uPlay and Origin. Or if not on Steam, then here, but only after the game is matured and cheaper. Though D:OS2 shows that this still might not prevent issues.
- Required additional testing of patches. Sure they need to be tested, but do you think the full installers do not have to be tested? And considering D:OS2, where the full install, from one SSD to another SSD, took almost half an hour...

The frustrating thing is also that D:OS2 got another update today. So if i had started downloading the new installer yesterday, I could have thrown everything away.

I was considering to pre-oder Pathfinder: Kingmaker (to get the wallet funds). I forgot about my troubles with Spellforce 3 to be honest. Now I know patching is still handled badly, so I will not pre-order. If reviews make me want to play the game, I will get it on Steam.

This solution sucks for Linux users. No Galaxy means re-downloading the entire installer every time. Which, I guess, isn't a whole lot different than the current situation - we Linux users rarely get patches anyways.

Before downloading, you may consider checking if the update comes with a changelog that states what the update is about, and if it actually affects you in any way (you can find changelogs in your library), as it may spare you some frustration.
Today's update of D:OS2 was a hotfix for Chinese players using a controller (that's an update I'd have personally skipped if I had downloaded the game yesterday).

Just a suggestion.

Having said that, I agree with what you said in your OP. It's been mentioned a number of times before, but the only response from GOG was that people aren't tech savvy enough, and maintaining multiple patches for the standalone installers would be confusing.

Well, the only thing that undoubtedly needs updating is antivirus. Everything else is up to the user. If user is not affected by existing bugs and doesn't care about new features then there is no point in updating.

Well, but checking the changelog would not have helped me in any way. The old installer is gone and all parts i could have downloaded would be useless. Also, while the changelog feature in the library is nice, this is one of the other things that are handled to inconsistently here. Sometimes there is really useful information, sometimes nothing.

Are those really idiots if they are doing fine? I had an old XP-machine in my household up until last year. Never had any issues with it.

[emphasis added]

That's why I said if you had downloaded the game, not just some parts of it, yesterday.

But there may still be hope. If you're missing some parts of an installer that got too quickly updated in the future, I suggest to contact Support and explain your situation. Chances are that they'll accommodate you with the ones you're missing via FTP download links (no guarantee, but they've done it in the past).

Regarding the changelog feature, while I agree that changelogs are sometimes pretty useless, I don't think the bit I highlighted is fair. GOG releases whatever the devs/pubs send them, i.e. whatever the content of a changelog, it was provided by the devs/pubs themselves (updates and changelogs by GOG are denoted as "Internal", if you've noticed). So, it isn't really any different from, say, Steam, and I'm not sure that GOG can do anything about it.
I will, however, say that I've occasionally seen devs post changelogs/patch notes in game fora that are way more detailed than those in our libraries; I assume that in these cases, devs/pubs are still responsible for the latter ones.

I literally cannot download the game in a single day.
I am on an 8 mb/s line. That alone would not be to bad. But I am sharing that line with a couple of people who regularly watch streams. And I am not really in a position where I can have running my computer the whole day or night. So im am lucky if I can download 2, or maybe three of those 4GB parts in a single evening. Luckily, i am not on a metered connection.

A couple of years ago, the Telekom, the biggest provider in Germany and a formerly state-owned company, had plans to convert all DSL flatrates to metered connections. With a per month data capacity of 75GB, so not even two downloads of D:OS2.
Luckily a massive shitstorm ensued and those plans were scrapped. Still a lot of other providers have what they call a "fair use policy" where they reserve tthe right to throttle connections after reaching an arbitrarily determined cap.

Faster connections are not available were I live.

And even if it does, does it get patches even then?

I don't even use Galaxy currently, yet I'd be fine with offline installers not getting separate patches (but the main installer being updated instead). I guess I normally don't play games when they are still new and overly buggy requiring lots of fixing, I rather play them after they've been fixed.

For multiplayer games, I don't mind using a client as auto-update is pretty much a must for multiplayer games, to keep all the players on the same patch level.

Well, yeah, I'd call you that for having such double-standards. Ranting against GOG for not doing something that you don't expect from Steam either, and Steam not even doing as much as GOG does currently (like offering any standalone installers for their games).

Oh well, I should have guessed...

Rarely. The vast majority of the time, the full installer is updated, and that's the only way to get updates. For the most part, it isn't too big of a deal, there aren't that many huge games available at GOG on Linux.

I know my version of The Witcher 2 is out of date, but I just haven't had the desire to commit 20GB of my capped bandwidth downloading a new version of a game I'm not currently playing.

If Galaxy existed for Linux, and if it allowed incremental updates, I'd probably be willing to use it just for managing bandwidth.

I tend to agree here. The awkward handling of offline installers has led to a lot of confusion for folks, and needs to be reviewed & revised.

I've skimmed over this thread, and to a certain extent, I agree with parts of what Timppu is saying. I don't agree with completely automating updates to the installer (not entirely sure to what degree that's possible anyway), but I think the idea is somewhat in the right direction.

I think that at a certain point, the most updated version of a build should be made the primary installer. So as an example:

You have a dev that releases several patches to build 1.58, ABCDE. You provide these incremental patches separately for a time, but once you see that they're all integrated into 1.58 & they're moving to 1.59, you roll them into an installer for 1.58.

However, what I think really needs to change here is how GOG is presenting both the installers & patches. Installers need to be in a couple of categories of their own, Current Installers & Archived Installers. Archived Installers would be compiled versions of major releases (i.e. all patches that came after the major release's initial release integrated into it), allowing people to revisit old versions of the game as they please. This would be especially interesting/useful for in development games, and games that have changed significantly over time, like No Man's Sky.

Current Installers would be the latest base build of the game for installation, with a subsection of Current Patches.

I think this would potentially solve issues for many folks, and generally improve the readability of the offline installer space. I know in my time here I've sometimes just found it a frustrating mess to navigate, so seeing some organizational improvement would be great.