At this point I will just think that you guys want this thread closed and are willing to keep offending each other for no apparent reason just to get it closed.
To be honest, I think it served its purpose, it seems.

Most of the serious active forum members already posted their opinions about it and, although we were warned that GOG actually values little or nothing to what we post or protest on the forums (with few exceptions), they do have material enough as proof that the Preservation Program should indeed be reviewed, because its not something this community fully agree on, at least not the way its being implemented right now. Added to the fact that the games seem to not be fully tested before being released with the Preservation Program tag, by the reports that the post-program updates are causing problems for a percentage of GOG customers on their systems.

Removing users power over the original products they bought is something I will never agree on (Again: That's why I came here in the first place) and wish we could still enjoy the unaltered, original offline installers of games that were later added to the Preservation Program, but we can't. Well... we can't without Galaxy, or, by what it seems, without entering the Future-To-Be-Named GOG subscription program through which, apparently, users will have the possibility to pay to get access to older versions of games they already own here.

All of this, to me, is further proof that they were, all this time, treating Offline Installers users as second class citizens on purpose, or decided to keep doing so because someone or 'someones' in the management decided that to do this would be a good idea.

So, to summarize, these are the factual issues present with the program at the time of writing this post with varying levels of case-to-case applicability:

- GOG reportedly did the "One Ring to Rule Them All" strategy, and tried to apply one kind of fix to all games being added to the Preservation Program initially, this is absurd because not all systems work the same way and not all games are coded the same way, therefore, this could affect many things GOG team isn't aware of. After being called out for that, newer games added to the program didn't necessarily use this tactic;

- Some games which worked fine on some older systems stopped working completely or had been affected performance-wise after being added to the Preservation Program because of the above;

- Some games that were reported that weren't working as intended, or at all, after being added to the program are still not fixed, months after dozens of reports;

- Offline Installers users that had not backed up their Pre-Program Offline Installers are now gated out of the product they bought and can't have access to it without using Galaxy - which doesn't work on systems like Linux, for example, therefore, all of the above also affect users from SteamDeck (as reported on some specific games forum posts that had their games working before the program on it, but now it doesn't anymore.)

- In the long term, this Preservation Program, the way it is being conducted at the time of writing this post, is actually hurting preservation of games and indirectly mods of these games. This is happening because most of these are very old games and if you change the original files of these games, many mods, community patches, community fixes and so on, which require the unaltered original game files, will simply stop working. Since the Program is still in "Beta" lets say, we don't know if GOG will ever fix the affected games, therefore, we might be with builds of games that were broken through the program and are now in a non-fixable state. The same applies to mods;

- The above has already happened with some community patches, community fixes and mods for some games added to the program.


To counter these issues, the Community on this Thread has honestly and fairly given some ideas to GOG on how they could fix the program in a simple way:

- Give Offline installers users the Rollback Feature currently only available for Galaxy users;

- Give users the choice to download the original Offline Installers builds Pre-Program, that is, give us the ability to, through the browser, in our Games page, download the latest build Pre-Preservation Program of each game that were added to the Preservation Program;

- Instead of patching the game directly, give your customers the choice: Create a "Preservation Program Patch" for each game that were and that will be added to the program in the future. That way, each user can decide if they want to try to Preservation Program version, and, if they have any issues with it, they will still be able to enjoy the games they bought without problems. Even if somehow the specific game build is broken by accident through the program, customers will still be able to download and play their original versions and builds through their offline installers;

- Stop the Preservation Program completely and put it at a halt and do not add anymore games to the Preservation Program, so then you guys can have time to analyse the situation and listen to your community.

That's it.
Thank you.