When I booted up steam today Shadow of Mordor downloaded a 3.2 GB "patch" most of which is the next DLC content, despite that content not actually being available for purchase yet (outside of the season pass which I did not buy). I love the game but don't like that they made me download content I'll most likely never unlock. I would understand if the game had multi-player and the content was needed so that you could still play with people who had purchased DLC but Shadow of Mordor is all single-player. Why would they make everyone download the DLC content before buying it?

It seems like a bad practice and I hope it doesn't catch on. Just posting here to complain like a grumpy old man.

That sounds like a poorly-managed upgrade system. The patch notes definitely don't indicate that any of the other fixes they incorporated required that bandwidth. Weird that they felt the need to pre-load it like that. Maybe they're just optimistic.