As I believe I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been busy playing the shit out of Skyrim for the past few weeks. Like pretty much every Bethesda game ever, it came out of the box (or, in this case, off the ‘tubes via Steam) with a shitton of little niggling bugs. Random crashes, quests not completing properly, things moving around that shouldn’t move (I’m looking at you, mannequins!) stuff like that. Nothing really game breaking (I had to use a console hack to get a quest to move to the next stage once, though) and nothing regular enough to be irritating.

And then patch 1.2 hit. Suddenly, my entire game was FUBAR. I couldn’t fast travel because clicking anywhere on the map just caused the map to close. I couldn’t read any books because once I was in the “read book” screen, I couldn’t get out of it–tab didn’t work, and although Esc took me to the system menu, once I got out of that I was still reading the book. This was not an issue I could live with or work around. So I did what most anybody would do, and I asked Google for help.

It was at this point that I rediscovered how absolutely unhelpful most internet help forums are. I rather quickly found a thread on one of these forums started by a guy who was having my exact problem. It had several dozen responses, so I thought I’d hit the jackpot and would find a fix right away. HA! No, that’s not how it works here on the ‘tubes.  Of the several dozen responses, only a few were actual attempts at solving the issue. One person suggested that maybe the patch had messed up some key bindings. No, that turned out not to be the case–but hey, not a bad guess, so no harm, no foul. Another person sort of insanely suggested going into the game folder and randomly deleting things, letting Steam re-download them, and see if that fixes things! Although that seemed completely insane to me, it was actually not far off from what eventually solved the problem for me (which, by the way, was telling Steam to validate the game cache–Steam found an error in one of the files, re-downloaded it, and everything was fine after that.)

The vast majority of the posts, however, were people being completely unhelpful by saying “I’m not having that problem.” Really? Well, gee, thanks! I’m glad you’re not having this problem.  But guess what? I am! And you just wasted my time by posting that response, dipshit! What on earth possesses people to post that in a thread on a tech support forum? Sure, if this were specifically a forum for developers, it could conceivably be helpful for you to let everybody know you can’t reproduce the problem. But that’s not what we’re doing here! We’re here to discuss the issues we’re having and find out if anybody else has had this problem and if so, how they fixed it. You butting in with “I’m not having that problem” is just about the least helpful thing you can do. But so many people feel compelled to do this–the thread in question had dozens of responses, and most of them were some variation on “I’m not having that problem.”  One guy even went so far as to say “I’ve got the PC version of the game, and I’ve not had a single problem, ever. Just saying.” Really? Really? That’s your contribution to this discussion? To brag about how you not only don’t have this problem, but you don’t have any other problems either? Thanks! While you’re being so amazingly unhelpful, why don’t you go find an AA meeting and let them all know how you’ve never been addicted to alcohol! Or go find a Weight Watchers group and tell them how you’ve never had to diet because you’ve always been skinny! Those are two equally helpful things you could be doing right now!

What really kills me is trying to figure out why these people are even reading the thread! Why are they even on the forum if they’re not having any problems? Do these people really spend all day reading internet forums about issues they don’t have just so they can tell everybody they don’t have them? It makes me wonder if they think that the people reporting the problem are just pathological liars, and they feel virtuous for calling them out on their bullshit by implying “Hey, look, I don’t have that problem, so it’s clear to me that you don’t really have it either–you’re just a whiner looking for attention!” Or, heaven help us all, do they really think they are making a meaningful contribution to the discussion by letting everybody know they have no frame of reference because they weren’t listening to the Dude’s story?

Seriously people. Fucking THINK before you post. Here’s a simple mental exercise. Before you post to a forum thread asking for help with a specific issue, ask yourself “Is what I’m about to post in any way a possible fix for the problem the original poster is having, or does it at least attempt to help fix the problem?” If the answer is “No,” then DON’T POST IT!

Like many of you out there, I disappeared down the hole of Skyrim for the past couple of weeks. It’s a pretty good game, so far vastly superior to its predecessor Oblivion, mainly because it does not involve closing fixteen hojillion Oblivion gates over and over and over again (worst plot requirement EVER.) However, being an open world game, it does involve a fair amount of walking around. Which, in general, is cool. There’s stuff to see, bandits and wild animals to kill, forts and caves to stumble across and explore, all sorts of fun stuff. I often enjoy just walking around, exploring.

What I do not so much enjoy are freaking escort quests. I’ve run across several of them in Skyrim so far, and I’ve come to dread the words “follow me.” There’s nothing worse than following a stupid NPC who is slowly… wandering… aimlessly… towards… something…. Worse yet, NPCs in Skyrim often appear to be programmed to stop and turn towards you if you get too close to them. So if you’re not careful, you’ll stop your NPC companion cold, forcing you to stop, step away, and wait for him to reset and continue walking. And no matter what he says, where he’s leading you to is never nearby. Oh, it might just be “over there,” but you see, NPCs only walk at once pace: glacial. So even if you could get there in twenty seconds running or even faster riding a horse, it’ll take you more like five minutes to follow the NPC there.

Seriously game designers, don’t do this. If you want me to be somewhere, either just warp me to that place immediately after I accept the quest, or tell me where the place is and let me go there at my own pace. To be fair, at least one escort quest I came across in Skyrim was of this last variety–I was told “you can either follow me or just meet me there.” That’s a step better, but there’s still an issue with that. At least in Oblivion, it was sometimes possible for NPCs who were out wandering the world to die if they got into a particularly nasty encounter with an animal or a group of bandits. You’d think this wouldn’t be possible, that somebody would have thought of this and made sure it couldn’t happen, but no, it happened.  There was one particular shop keeper in Oblivion who, as part of her back story and part of a quest line you could optionally follow, would take a stroll over to another town once a week or so. One day when I was out walking, I randomly came across this poor lady, dead in the forest. She’d apparently wandered into a nasty random encounter with some wild animal and gotten herself killed. This not only made it impossible to do her quests, it made it so her shop was never open anymore! I don’t know if this situation can occur in Skyrim, but I know I’m generally not eager to find out, so when an NPC says “follow me” I groan and curse at the game but do what I’m told.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of poker. It’s one of the few things I can do year round that I really enjoy doing, and it helps take my mind off everything else that’s going on in my life.

Unfortunately, despite having been playing for years now, I’m not that good at poker. Ever since Black Friday, I’ve been forced back into the local casinos to get my poker fix, which is even worse for me, since although I was a winning online player, I seem to be a break-even at best live player. I’m not sure exactly why, but over my lifetime I’ve definitely lost more than I’ve won playing live, where the opposite was true online.

Anywho, I’ve been playing some live tournaments lately, trying to relearn some of the mad skillz I seem to have forgotten since getting kicked off the online poker rooms. Probably my biggest leak in live tournament play is that I sometimes just completely go nuts and make a horribad play in completely the wrong situation, and it’ll cost me all or nearly all of my chips. Similar to pro player Mike Matusow, I’ll often dump off all my chips in crazy fashion, then walk away muttering to myself about how awful that was.

Last night, I got into it with a player two seats to my left. He’d had my number all night, and was a good player overall. I couldn’t steal his blind, and he always seemed to make exactly the right move against me. I kept fixating on him, wondering exactly what I had to do to win a pot off him. His playbook seemed fairly simple. Whenever I raised from late position when he was in the blinds, he’d call, check to me on the flop, call any reasonable flop bet, then check to me again on the turn. If I checked behind, he’d fire a bet on the river trying to take the pot. If I bet the turn, he’d ponder for a bit, and either call or fold–but he always seemed to know where I was, because he’d call when I was betting with air and fold when I had a hand. I always seemed to need a hand to beat him, and when I had a hand I couldn’t make any money from him because he seemed to know he was behind and would fold. It’s frustrating as hell when someone is clearly reading you very well, and having such a tough player in the blinds made blind stealing (a must in tournament play) nearly impossible.

Finally, I had my moment of stupid. I was on the button with AQo, and made a raise. Of course my nemesis calls in the big blind, and we see the flop heads up. It comes three small cards, and he checks to me. This was shaping up just like every other hand I’d played against him in the tournament.  If I bet, he’d call. If I improved on the turn and bet, he’d fold. If I didn’t improve and still bet, he’d call. He was frustrating the shit out of me, and all I was thinking was “What haven’t I tried yet?” I’d tried making a standard bet, I’d tried checking when I missed the flop, I’d tried checking when I hit the flop and betting the turn trying to “disguise” my hand–nothing worked, this guy picked it all off, every time.

So I shoved all my chips into the pot, thinking maybe I could just blow him off the hand right here. He immediately called and turned over two jacks. I shook my head, knowing I’d made the worst possible play, and turned over my AQo.

“Why the hell would you shove with that hand?” he said derisively. I opened my mouth to say something (I still don’t know exactly what) but just then the dealer brought the turn, which was an ace.

“Because I knew that was coming,” I said, like a true luckbox asshole. The river was no help to him, so he walked away muttering to himself about how he’d set me up perfectly and still lost.

Now, let me be clear here.  I made a horrible play. I made the play almost entirely because this one guy had been pissing me off all night, which is probably the worst reason to do anything in poker. He truly had set me up and I’d blundered into the trap and still come out unscathed. That’s part of the beauty of poker, though–sometimes the worst hand wins, and if it wasn’t that way, nobody would play.

But here’s the thing that keeps bugging me. The guy claimed he’d put me on AK or AQ, which is what I had, so he’d called with his jacks to see a flop and try to trap me into bluffing off some of my chips.  Then the flop came three rags and I shoved my chips into the middle, and he insta-called. Wait, really? Sure, if you really think I have two big cards and am bluffing (which I was) that was the right play. But… you berate me for making an insane play with two over cards, a bet you can’t believe I’d made.  And yet that thought never entered your head before calling? You can’t believe I’d make a play like that, and yet you called off all your chips banking on the fact that I had, in fact, made exactly that play? That does not really compute.

For the record, I shoved partly because I’m insane, but partly because I didn’t think he had a pair either. His pattern was to call me almost any time I raised his blind, so it’s not like I can assume he has a pair every time he does that. If he has AK and I blow him off the hand with AQ, then I look like a genius.

Clearly next time, I should follow T.J. Cloutier’s strategy, and play only medium pairs so I can flop middle set and bust him.