I think this topic is pretty much done, though I'm surprised the votes that followed up in my favor.
I think for less regular players, the patch notes are sufficent, experimentation is important. Major (say, 7.0) patch notes would cover things fine enough. For less frequent players, arcen patch lists between major releases can get to be quite overwhelming. A semi-official update wouldn't affect me directly at all. It would make it a bit easier for me to rope in casual sometime players, but it isn't necessary, particularly if I migrate my sessions over to the arcen community or stick with 2-4 player games only - or wait for college/school students to have their breaks.
I originally estimated maybe a month more of polish at most, but I didn't anticipate how much was in the pipeline... and I'm not even sure Keith did either, considering how we went from inconclusive discussions to threads that people actually more or less agreed upon, practically
unthinkable. I'm quite a bit more eager to see what turns up than cast anything in stone at this point.
I'm not really worried about version to version changes, but more the cumulative nature of them makes writing any guide a bit difficult unless I stick with solely 6.000. With just the purchasing changes to special forces alone the difference is unthinkable. What I wouldn't mind is something similar to this
manual update thread discusses, even though I frequently forget it exists. The
list is actually up to date, despite the thread itself being from 2010. Since my guide would primarily be written for a small community of players, I'd feel pretty comfortable recommending a particular patch to distribute, maybe even mirror. If I even understand things correctly, I could pre-merge them all into one zip file myself, as long as I took care in what was overwriting what. I could get away with recommending unzipping 2-3 patches pretty easy, 7 a bit less so. It's not like they'd need to manually edit code or config files anyways.
So anyways, I regularly forget that list both exists and is up to date, but it lets me more or less do what I need.
As long as the post-6.000 patches are technically separate from the pre 7.0 expansion content, I should be able to more or less wrap up what I need to make a nice introductory guide to the game and avoid some of the 'new guy' burnout and 'explaining again' burnout. I'll just wait till things actually do settle down for real rather than when I expect them to. I may need to do a little experimenting with steam/non-steam manual patching, but it is probably pretty straightforward, this not being Diablo or a first person shooter.
Poll
