Ye I know I'm a complete noob when it comes to installing those things

All I do is start steam. And click play skyrim. And I go play. I never clicked any yes or no's for adding patches.

Do those patches automatically get downloaded by steam? And do I play with them ?

^{yes they auto d/l and install UNLESS you've got updating switched off}

Nope, no use. That option is reset every time you restart Steam for some dumb reason. There is no way to avoid the game being updated.

Patches are automatically applied. However, they are now going through a Public Beta before they go live, so we should not have a 1.2 debacle again.

I will say the last few patch rollouts have been smooth and issue free, other than save sludge. As in the Save has data in it that prevents a patched quest from going forward, or to say it another way, a patch does not always fix an in-progress quest. And, of course, people not updating their mods after the patch. But, the Beta helps that too as the modders have time to update their mods during the beta.

I will close this as we have several threads to discuss the patch already.