I'm going to buy Skyrim next week, but I've heard there's a hell of a ride with this new 1.2 patch Some really annoying or ridiculous (or both) things are going on in the game, so the question is, should I install it at all? Is it possible to deny instalation of this patch, or do I have to play offline to make sure the game won't make me install it? And is it possible to install the 1.2 patch and play normally (I mean is it 100% sure that it will screw my game even if I install it before started my journey in Skyrim)?

If you just put it in and start it up normally it will try to install the 1.2 patch. If you want you can install it, or you can just cancel the patch and play without it. Most people have seen some improvement in gameplay with the more recent patch, though be aware that currently magic resistance is broken. It really depends on how much you plan to play - if you're going to play like 50+ hours every week then you'll probably want the patch or you may likely hit some gamebreaking fps lag before long, where if you'll only play maybe a couple hours a day it'd probably be a couple weeks before you ran into any problems so it's likely there'd be another improved patch by then.

The only way to win at Skyrim is to not play.

Yeah, I'm a bit afraid of this magic resistance bug. As far as I know, even high-level characters have problems defeating dragons, sometimes even powerful mages. So it will be impossible for me to defeat a dragon if I'll be on level 10 or something. Backward flying dragons are also massive immersion killers. On the other hand, I'm aware of some strictly technical problems that had place before the patch - lags you mentioned, something connected with save size and some other I can't remember now. I think it is better for now to play with some lag than not being able to play at all because of being owned by every magic-using creature :/ I definitely won't be playing 50 hrs a week, rather 10-15.

dont buy it man its really bad the framerate drops so low you cant even aim at what your trying to it wait for a fix if you dont want to waste 60 bucks

I've just watched some vids on YouTube. DAMN! This lag REALLY svck! Thanks for saving my money. I really wanted to play Skyrim, but I didn't realize it works THAT BAD on PS3. Unfortunately my PC is pretty old, so I will have to wait until Bethesda fix the PS3 version. Huge disappointment, but I'm not paying for screwing me :/