Your Most Frustrating Oblivion Moments

[Nobody09]

Ok. Most frustrating. There's a CM Mod that has 2 characters. An Ice elf mage and a wolf elf barbarian. I like the ice elf mage. She can do group heals through the tears of the savior quest because of cold immunity. What's annoying is just the general combat stuff. It's really funny in many ways but annoying in many ways. For one she never has any skill in any sort of weapon. So I try to giver her a nice sword or a nice bow and she instantly begins casting the summon war axe for everything. The problem with that is with the obse script extender. If she has that war axe summoned and I go to do trade the game hard locks. Reset button time. I don't rely on partners to do any damage because it's just been my experience that they will summon a daedra run back to where theres a blocking structure and cast ice spells at nords, fire spells at anything super resistant to fire and just genrally be annoying. I only use them carry loot. But what do they do. They have to use every single bow I give them till it's not a perfect health and wont stack. They also want to change clothes all the time and don't know anything about elemental clothing. If you give them clothing that is sigil stone elemental enchnated they should have 75 ac and and 75 percent damage reduction. They'll throw on a lousy 10 ac piece of daedric instead of the 25 ac clothing item you gave them.

 

The most annoying and I mean absolutely INFURIATING thing about the game is when you hit 75 skill in armorer. It completely nukes every single storage chest you have in the game. It apparently futzes around with the item id transposing it to some one of the wierder temprory in game id's. Which has some strange affect of nuking every database the game uses. All chests now have 2 or 3 or 4 listings on them. Meaning if you put stuff in them only some of it shows up and you have to quick save and exit the game and reload to get to the next list page and find what you want in the chest. It's perfect and works perfectly right up till you get 75 skill armorer after that you can't just throw stuff in a chest or retrieve something you want. It's a save and reload game till whatever you want to see if you are wanting to save a few more of shows up. Like i come back have 6 ebony currasses, 3 gauntlets, 2 greaves and I want to save 10 of each piece and only helms and shields show up. If you save and reload ebony disapears entirely from chest. If you save and reload again a couple more ebony items show up in the chest and if you save and exit again the rest of the ebony armor will list in the chest.

 

It always makes me so mad and frustrated that i start piling crap up in rooms and throwing it all over the game world and STILL you can't find anything. So I get mad and restart.

 

The combat thing though always makes me laugh. Game companies are always harking about artificial intellegence and all their code ends up doing the absolute 180 degree opposite of intelligent.

[Striker879]

On the problem with item stacking in storage after 75 armorer, you can usually find the missing item from the stack by putting another item in then closing the window. Your newest addition will now be the missing item and you can get that sparkly one you 'lost' when you next access that container. Useless looted clothing is one of my favourites for the job. If you don't put anything repaired above 100 percent mixed with non-buffed pieces it helps. I hear you ... frustrating oversight by Bethesda.

[Nobody09]

On the problem with item stacking in storage after 75 armorer, you can usually find the missing item from the stack by putting another item in then closing the window. Your newest addition will now be the missing item and you can get that sparkly one you 'lost' when you next access that container. Useless looted clothing is one of my favourites for the job. If you don't put anything repaired above 100 percent mixed with non-buffed pieces it helps. I hear you ... frustrating oversight by Bethesda.

 

It's not a frustrating oversight at all. It's simply what game companies do. They work with the bleeding edge of data structures and always combine their data structures to insure that the game has glitches and stupid things in it that can't possibly be tracked, understood or fixed. It doesn't matter if it affects another systems integrity. They feel like it's necessary to have it as a 'reward' for a treadmill. An attention focuser.

I did beta testing for anarchy online and through 90 percent of beta they had a flat file database that would lose items, ? mark items, dupe items right and left. It's the same thing. The database they use can't handle arrows, stacks of things, and items having an id coupled with a damage percentage id coupled with another system id that changes the base parameters from broken to 100 percent to broken to 125 percent. So what do they do? They put lots and lots and lots of those things in the game. 40 different kinds of enchanted arrows. If the game would allow you to advance and retract skills I'd do it. I'd advance my skill to 75 repair all gear I'm wearing to 125 percent. retract it down to 74 and repair anything I want to restore. It makes the treadmill nonsense and makes you not even want to try anything to work the treadmill.

One of the best ways is to simply keep a rusty iron set of bows, daggers, and axes for training, sell and dump all iron and steel weapons, keep everything silver or better. Load up chest full of sets of armor and weapons. You can go from 75 skill in armorer to 82 or 85 instantly just by processing your war chest. But yet again. Even if you sell off most of the junk you just end up going from broke to having like 125 thousand gold instantly and nothing to spend it on.

Then you throw in the other problems it causes. Like if you use partners to carry loot. Sometimes not always but most times if you hand them something they will instantly convert it back to 100 if they equip it the second you finish the share. This gives you several points in armorer at a time when you don't care any more.

Then you have the treadmills turning other treadmills to meaninglessness. I usually up heavy armor to 75 just so I can equip some heavy gear to sell and get the weight discount. Meaningless once you've gotten to the point where you can collect just 3 little sigil stones and enchant 3 little pieces of clothing with 25 percent fire, frost and shock shield. Same thing with light armor. It's something sexy to wear to look at while you are using it to raise skill. I usually raise speed with athletics 2 or 3 times and then revert to light armor for the points. I just get fed up with agility and finally start pcadvancing security through the roof once agility reaches 60 or 70 because the tumber speeds are rediculous based on the level. The minigame is not a game at all. On the pc you get too many tumblers that are just going to fail no matter what you do based on your security skill at the tumbler at the time. It works on the xbox from what I've seen but on the pc some systems it works some systems it's severly broken.

The curves on skills are all junk. It's too hard to raise athletics, it's too easy to raise armorer and the specializations things mess everything up. Mercantile is a sick joke, armorer is easier to raise from 75 to 93 than it is to raise from 37 to 50. You can spend a bunch of time raising mercantile and speechcraft to get max disposition when if you just level you end up with one loot haul being enough to take a vendor from 35 to 100 disposition based on gold caps.

There's too many screw ups with rewards. Like personality you want every single thing at master. Because it's great to be able to just boost disposition of anyone you run into at the time. You definitely want illusion at master because illusion spells are awesome. And you definitely want mercanitile at 75 so you can have something to do with your cash. But take block, heavy armor, and armorer. Who cares about block at master. Well if you want to finish the stupid quest for the gray knight you better have block, athletics and blade at master because if you don't you are never going to get the perks. But the athletics master perk only helps you raise acrobatics after a time when you don't need it because it's at max or close to max and you get more acrobatics from simply falling down. But the master shield perk just disarms people and makes thier weapon fall through the floor half the time. But only if it's a weapon you want.

That's what I hate most about oblivion. The treadmills became counter productive interweaved hipocracies with the quests. Plus the quests are all hipocracies anyway. Oh poor thorinor is robbing graves and selling the clothes. When what do you do during the azura star quest? Rob graves and sell clothes. What do you do during the amelions tomb quest. Rob graves and sell clothes. You buy a pirate lair and do quest after quest murdering pirates or fighing pirates because without the pirate lair security raising is pain.

It's become like this. Psychotic. Not fun like daggerfall. Daggerfall was awesome. You staid level 1 to 3 as you trained skills up, climbing the walls at the inns, doing quest after quest for the mages guild, and all the various guilds and temples. You prepared yourself for when it came time to level. You leveled you finished the main quest you had fun. You went back and did it over as a dark elf or a high elf this time. Then you put it away.

Now it's become a brutal strange hipocracy of counterproductive quests and skills. You had money to train and didn't care about money after you started on the main quest. Now you don't have money to train or buy houses at low levels, then the game goes from overly sinking your cash to not sinking it at all. From stupid useless limitations of game play to unlimited without any purpose. From level 10 to 15 you can go from barely being able to afford training spells and 2650 for a stupid shack with storage to being able to plunk down 35 grand for house in skingrad just so you can get a few shepards pies and still have 20 grand left over. It goes from novice equipment in alchemy that you can't even make a decent healing potion to master level equipment where if you drink one of your healing potions nothing is going to be able to kill you for the next 180 seconds. You can skip training for a level and put the points in train at 70 plus skill levels after you level 10 times and it won't even dent your cash. But in the beginning 30 dollar loots is supposed to pay for 1400 dollar training sessions.

And some of the things are just absurd. The level 20 quest for goldbrand where you kill something in 2 hits on easy, 6 hits on normal difficulty and loot 127 strong healing potions from them.

But at least it matches real life. Where rules and approaches and tacticts are stupid and arbitrary and meaningless because the game designers are psychotic, illogical and simply trying to grab your attention and mind screw you. With rewards that are meaningless once you achieve them. Thanks for the +15 blade ring but my blade is at 95 skill now.

Oh but having leveled items is another great chance to have 4 or 5 different versions of something with 4 or 5 different item id's to mess up the database 4 or 5 times more. And all these years later still downloading mods. Yes I used to use a mod that changed leather armor that asassins could wear from brown to black. And I'm still naming itemmaker stuff funny names. I used to make a yellow thong that looks amazingly like huntsman leather thong today with a poison over time spell and called it stinky drawers. Now I buy a gold belly chain from the goddess store and enchant with str and call it WeightLifter's Belt.

Basically my take on oblivion is that it's daggerfall if you hired psychotics and neurotics and asked them put more cowbell code in.

ti's a semi fun time waster but the storage bug just stabs it in the frikkin heart. Modders do such wonderful and I mean absolutely wonderful work with it. But without being authorized to inject lithium into bethesda employees there's only so much crazy they can drain out of the game.

Can't wait for TES 5. A bunch of crazy stuff plus shouts. I hope they keep the weird curves too. Like athletic from 5 to 70 = slow motion. Athletic from 70 to 80=normal speed. Athletic from 80 to 100 equals comical fast motion movement like you're in a permanent strange virtual munsters world.

[lostone1993]

My fustrating atm is I am stuck between my anvil house and a rock near it

[Striker879]

My fustrating atm is I am stuck between my anvil house and a rock near it

Ahhh ... the proverbial rock and a hard place. Console prompt and tcl your troubles away.

 

Open the console with the tilde ( ~ ) key just below the Tab on most keyboards. If that doesn't open the console for you check your Oblivion.ini (located in your Documents\My Game\Oblivion folder for Vista and Win 7 or My Documents\My Games\Oblivion if you're a Win XP type like me). Open it in Notepad and in the Find off the Edit menu search for bAllowConsole and set the value to one (bAllowConsole=1). The console command tcl is a toggle. Make sure you have nothing displayed across the top of your screen (if there is click on something, a door an NPC whatever twice ... not double click, click twice, that will clear the top of your screen). Type tcl then enter and you'll see Collision is off ... tcl again and you'll get Collision is on. In between hit the tilde again to close the console and walk right through whatever your stuck behind. Make sure you're not too high off the ground or stuck up to the waist in the ground before you open the console and tcl things back to normal.

[Striker879]

@ Nobody09 ... I agree with most of your points, and have noticed many myself. Some are just a little irritating, others prompt a more 'verbal' response, usually including some colourful adjectives. I keep playing the game because, despite it's shortcomings it has so many things to appeal to my inner control freak/micromanager/explorer/murderer/good samaritan ... you get the picture. I try to focus on what I can change/control ... hence my growing interest in modding the game. In a perfect world I think we'd all be a little bored.