agog4games: I haven´t seen a game yet, that didn´t get an appropriate stand alone patch.
Actualy even quite a few games with a number of incremental ones.
Appart from that, BACKUP&GOODIES already provides everything you´re asking for.
Save games are the only real problem that I see, but I guess that´s what the new cloud feature kinda solves.
Or one can just figure out where they are and back them up by hand.
Just because you haven't personally seen it doesn't mean that it doesn't occur. Titan's Quest is a perfect example of a game that has been updated about 6 or 7 times in the last 6 months to which only a new full installer was provided and no incremental patches. Anyone wanting to update the game without Galaxy had to download an entire 4-5GB installer file each and every time a new update came out. Titan's Quest is not the only game which has been updated in this manner. Perhaps you either do not own any games that have had this happen, or you never noticed or cared about it before, but it does happen quite often or people would not be upset about it. It does not affect me personally as I have modern high speed Internet but everyone is not so lucky.
The "What game did just update" thread regularly has people complaining because a newer game that is getting updated regularly is only getting new full blown installers with no patches. Anyone who doesn't buy new games and sticks to only older games that do not get updated very often or at all, would not be as likely to encounter this problem.
You're a new person walking into a thread where people are discussing a feature that is currently lacking from the Galaxy client as of version 1.2.0 which did exist in 1.1.x and older releases for 2 years now. That is the ability to configure where manual game downloads are stored. Many people myself included relied upon this feature and have used it ever since we've been customers of GOG.com, some of us for well over 5 years now. The ability to configure where your downloads are stored on your computer in any kind of downloader software is a fundamental configuration feature that virtually every piece of software that is capable of downloading any kind of files has provided since the beginning of time, and both GOG Downloader and Galaxy also provided this feature up until March 22, 2017 when Galaxy 1.2.0 was released.
As such, many of us who relied on this feature because we have a very good reason to configure where our downloads get stored are displeased that this configuration option has been removed without warning nor explanation and replaced with a default configuration that is completely unsuitable for the purposes we need. It was probably done out of lack of foresight rather than to purposefully be consumer unfriendly, but the result is the same - a feature relied upon by a great many users has been completely removed. For some this is inconsequential and their personal habits and needs can silently adapt. Good for them, they're unaffected and their voice holds no weight in this conversation because they are not affected negatively by the consequences of this change, nor are the requests of those of us who want to see configuration brought back going to have any negative effect on such users.
For others, they may prefer to be able to configure it but it may not actually cause them any major problems so they may or may not take issue with the change. Again, if someone is able to adapt to the lack of options and they are ok with it - then there is no problem for them and they don't need to concern themselves with the problem.
Then there are users such as myself and many others who purposefully require this feature to work or else we simply can not use Galaxy client to download our games in the way we intend to at all, and we are at least currently and hopefully temporarily forced to not use Galaxy to download and instead use GOG Downloader or the web browser or some other 3rd party program to download our games. Needless to say, we are less than pleased to see a configuration option that we've had available to us for over 5 years now across two separate programs provided by GOG be removed suddenly without warning or explanation which has a huge impact on the way we use the software.
As an example for those who are completely unaffected by this problem to try to understand one single way in which it is a problem for people such as myself, is that I have several disks in my computer.
C: -> a very small 120GB SSD drive for the operating system and nothing else.
E: -> a 2TB hard disk where most of my applications and games are installed to
F: -> a 2 TB hard disk where all of my downloads, archives, backups and other large size files are stored
My games get installed always on E:, which is generally full and usually has no more than a few hundred megabytes to a gigabyte or so of free hard disk space available. My F: drive is where every single program I use to download anything - downloads files to always, including GOG Downloader and GOG Galaxy for 5+ years now. I do not have space on E: to download my games to, nor do I want nor plan on freeing up any space on that drive to downlaod games to, nor will I remotely even entertain the idea that I now "have to". It is just completely unacceptable to remove this configuration option that users have relied upon for half a decade or more and force us all to do it in a way that does not work for us in our own computer setups.
Even if I did have 600 terabytes of free space on my E: drive however, I do not want my downloads being scattered all over the game installation directories on the live hard disk that I actually use every day. I want it stored on my archival disk which can be easily removed for storage without impacting the rest of the operation of the computer. And I do not want to have to go through 600 game directories on my E: drive after downloading each game and drag and drop each game one at a time onto the F: drive where I actually want them to reside.
There is no good reason to remove such a configuration option that many users rely upon and which amounts to maybe a dozen or two lines of code in the program. It does not simplify the maintenance of the program or give any real benefit to GOG developers whatsoever. It simply makes the software inflexible in a way that every other program ever made including GOG's own previous software allows people to configure.
What I don't understand is why people who don't care about where their files are downloaded to feel the need to try to dictate that every other user out here should also feel the same way when we are now inconvenienced, and how somehow our money that we pay for our games shouldn't result in us having features that we want and expect to work too.
This is a damn simple feature to have in the program, and the more people speak out about it like it isn't a problem and people like me should just "deal with it", the more f**k*ng pissed off I get about it.
Loyalty works two ways. GOG wants loyal customers, and customers want loyal GOG. This feature removal is very upsetting, and I may be one person but I own 545 products on GOG.com currently and I wont be spending another cent here until this problem is rectified and the option to configure the download directory is restored in the Galaxy client. As a paying customer, I should not
have to go reverse engineer the damned protocol and write my own client or wait for someone else to do it just to have a damned simple feature every downloader program made since the beginning of time has.
I'm less pissed off at GOG about this problem than I am at the other customers that think just because they don't need or care about some feature gives them the right to invalidate other customer's needs and expectations especially over something that amounts to a trivial dozen or so lines of code that actually used to be there and were for whatever reasons removed.
My wallet doesn't open until the problem is fixed - period. One size does
not fit all. I've got a feeling I'm not alone.