It disables patching on whatever games you set it on permanently. Although as I said then you won't get any updates so it's a double edged sword.

I'm don't do mods. Simply because I don't know much about it.

I'm old school.

You pop that sucker in (or it is downloaded like here).

You play.

But hey, maybe I can learn. I heard quite different. GAME breaking bugs. That is one reason I'm concerned about auto updates. That was somewhat reassuring though. Thanks.

P.S. God I wish this was the 90s back in the old days where I made fire with ma bare hands...

As I and others said above, though, it's not the patches you need to worry about but whether Steam will allow you to play your games or not on a give day. If the servers are down for "maintenance" you must wait for some games for them to come back up in order to validate your games and play them. And I myself am having the infamous game is not available currently error where one of my games won't even load when I click it. The rest work fine though but it is annoying.

Yes. And even though I read the FAQ for how to solve the issue it seems pretty complicated in that you have to know what your file is called if I'm not mistaken. Honestly, I suck at this type of stuff.

Hitting the computer is what I use as a remedy for all problems (I kid).

Well, my Skyrim game decided to update itself some mysterious reason even though I disabled the autoupdate feature. I don't think its a widespread problem on steam, and it might have something to do with it being a steamwork game.

Doesn't offline mode (if it decides not to be "iffy") supposed to remedy this?

In your opinion, how frequent is the maintenance thing?

Yes someone else said that autoupdate feature is perm. Guess it is subjective. Woo hoo! I'm excited! I get to find out!
Well I heard people say the default was better as the patches introduce more bugs?

I think you have to reset it to online mode every 3 weeks or so.

In any case, the autopatching is good and bad, it is bad only if the devs abandon the thing and/or refuse to let steam have the patches. The autopatcher HAS messed up things like Dungeons of Dredmor (the second to last patch introduced a nasty recurrent teleport bug that messed up many save files, but then again, Dredmor is a roguelike, and characters are pretty much disposable on that), but the devs are very active, and they provided a hotfix within days.

It does get annoying with heavily developed games, as I mentioned. TF2 downloads huge patches weekly, and it seems like Dungeon Defenders LOVES to download patches ranging from 100 to 800 megs daily.

Hell, IIRC there was a day where it was patched THREE TIMES. Again, it is not a problem with Steam, but with the devs, and with the nature of certain games where they are patched a lot more than what one would expect.
Yeah, new patches can mess up things, as it has happened both in Skyrim AND a Dredmor, but the devs are active fixing those.

That may have been true with 1.2, but 1.3 fixed that up. At this point 1.3 is better than no patches. Its still buggy, but its less buggy than before.

And it somehow runs and looks better than Oblivion. And is more stable. Damn.

Maintenance happens whenever Valve decides to do it, and can range from planned downtime which they announce beforehand to server crashes of either part(like the store going down and not the game servers, or vice versa) or all of the client's features.
It's not just Steam games though...games throughout history have had occasional bugs introduced in patches....usually though these get fixed right away in later hotfixes and patches. Usually after a good number of patches though the game becomes a much better and more stable product than the original.

FYI, you cannot disable auto patching. You can *delay* patching until when you go to a launch a game, but that's as much as you can do these days. If a patch is released on Steam, you're going to have to download it even if you don't want it.

You may be able to void that by going into offline mode or physically removing your net connection. But none of the patching settings in Steam is going to permanently stop you from getting future patches.

Further, when you first install it, you will have no choice in installing all currently available patches, those are forced on you.

I meant individual game patches. And you can disable those per game in the settings for each game.

You can launch skyrim without steam, although I can't remember how - or if you need a cracked thingy, which there definitely is.

The latest patch - 1.3 doesn't have any major bugs for me personally. 1.2 is another story, that one bugged the hell out of dragons. 1.3 still doesn't fix a ton of quest related bugs however.