Which is better than the alternative: You install a buggy, low quality game on day 0 and have a horrible experience. After suffering in agony and banging your head in frustration you notice the sizable patch on the developer's website and start the same lengthy download that Steam would have forced, and then waste time figuring out how to apply the patch.
Personally I feel Steam is doing me a service in this case, I would much rather wait for the update and have a quality experience then wind up in the hospital bleeding from the forehead from having banged my head against the wall in frustration over game bugs.
If you insist on buying a DVD and you only have a dial-up connection there is really NO solution for you other than to wait until the 2nd batch of DVD's ship and you can get a copy of the game that does not require a big download, no matter whether it be through steam or manually downloaded off a website.
I have absolutely nothing against Steam for my situation and I plan on pre-ordering the deluxe edition and buying a physical copy (some minor concerns about parental controls for my young kids with Steam but I can work around that).
The download requirement is a non-issue for me as I have a 22Mb+ connection so large updates are not going to bother me, and like yourself I am in general happy to have the update available for me. (I do have an issue with later updates being forced on me but more on that below.)
I do however believe that this is a real and significant issue for those on dial-up or with download quotas and some of the earlier remarks (not just the one I quoted) were belittling those concerns and ignoring inconvenient truths.
Note that yes you can turn updates off in steam...
How does one accomplish this? I have been unable to find a way that works consistently and in a user-friendly way.
Do you mean updates of games or updates of the Steam client?
On a game by game basis there is a disable automatic update option but there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the functionality of that option; it does not allow you to prevent updates (unless you are strictly playing offline only); for any other situation it only gives you control over the timing of the download.
you can disable patches on steam games, thus you will not download the patch, thus, no 50mb to download, thus you only have to activate once and never go online again. If you want the patch you have to suffer through a 50mb download regardless of if it's through steam or somewhere else, so what's the big deal?
In fact what that option does is turn off the automatic, preemptive, background downloading of patches for a game (which is a good option if you have a game you don't play anymore and don't want to update). This option explicitly states that updates will only be downloaded and applied when you want them BUT running the game when online counts as manually requesting an update! So in fact there is no way to avoid updates if you want to play online or just use the in-game community features. (There are pros and cons to this and I understand why you want all online players at the same patch level but it is likely to cause issues for some people, just observe the trouble BTS3.19 caused.).
See
this Steam forum thread as one example of discussion on this topic and for extra details.
In fact, things are actually slightly worse in practise because if you are online and you start the game Steam notes that an update is available and after that will not let you run the game either online or offline until the game has been patched!
That's right if you accidentally run Civ online just once you are hosed.
This option also doesn't help when you reinstall because my understanding, based on multiple sources, is that Steam insists on installing
all current updates before letting you play any game you install.
The net of this is that if you purchase and install physical media you cannot play the game until you have downloaded and installed all the current patches. It appears there is no way to 'go offline' after activation but before Steam notices a patch is available, at which point of course the game is set to not run until the patch is installed.
For most of those of us lucky enough to have an unlimited high-speed download this is somewhere between tolerable and positively fine, but those who do not have high-speed internet deserve sympathy at the least...not the platitudes and half truths.
In addition:
This doesn't of course address clashes between patches and mods. There were in Civ4 very good reasons for not wanting to automatically apply some patches because they messed up some mods, ruined PBEM games etc. etc.
We don't know if Civ5 will have these issues yet...but unless the programmers have been especially clever in a way I cannot foresee then giving us access to the equivalent of the famous Civ4 DLL source code (which is surely necessary if civ5 modding is to be as unprecedented as promised) will ensure that this same issue occurs with Civ5.
The constant danger of accidentally updating Civ5 when there is no way to back out a patch will surely lead to many unhappy customers even including some of us lucky souls on broadband.
I have done extensive research (not just Wikipedia
)to arrive at this conclusion. If any of the comments I have made are verifiably wrong I will actually be very happy and I would welcome correction (with quoted sources). I am not looking to hate on Steam or any of its fans just understand how this decision by 2K/Firaxis will affect all of us without any of the rancour that has unfortunately filled the discussion until now.