Skyrim 12-01-11 To Patch or Not to Patch?

That is the question.

I've delayed starting up steam, because quite frankly my game is running perfectly except for the absolutely infuriating penchant for my hotkeyed items to come unbound. Particularly when in a tense battle.

I'm scrolling thru patch news facts and can get no solid opinions. I see backwards dragons and questionable performance issues/ crashes (as there has always been). Have the hotkeys been fixed? Has anyone's game been broken by the update? Is it worth the risk? is there any risk or am i being paranoid?

i'd like to fire up steam to check out deals and stuff, and maybe even play a little but paranoid

I've not played a huge amount since the patch, but I haven't noticed anything being terribly broken. Mouse movement was completely screwed up again, requiring me to undo the previous mouse fix to get it running normally. Performance seems a bit worse, so I've had to nudge some of the settings down some, which is annoying, since some other people say it's better for them.

I've not really noticed if the resistances are broken myself. I don't really use hotkeys, apart from a couple of really common spells, but those seem to work as well as they ever did.

It seems to be a variable experience. It might be worth sitting on it for a few days to see if there's going to be a quick anti-patch patch.

I am in the "Not to" camp myself.

Been running stock since first installing and the only tweak I felt the need to do was
bShowCompass=0 (I think I pushed some water maps to 1024 iirc too).

No crashes in 50 hours and only a couple of minor bugs(*) so unless I see a significant patch list (1.3 perhaps ?) I don't see why I should fix something that is not broken...

(* That said I have somehow managed to visit only Whiterun, Windhelm, Riften and their environs and have not followed the main quest beyond first visiting High Hrothgar. I think I shall refrain to do so until a hefty quest bug fixlist pops up. Having too much fun exploring and doing sidequests anyway).

Also strangely enough after the first 2-3 hours it stopped forgetting my quick key bindings (its almost as it is related to specific objects or combinations!)

Ive only experienced one CTD, and it was probably in the first 5 hours of play. Played probably 25ish hours so far, and the biggest problem seems to be the hotkey thing.

Surprisingly, I can hotkey just two normal un-worked swords and have no problem, two completely identical un-worked items w/ none other of the same type in the inventory works fine. Which was an unpleasant surprise to me because I spent the money to buy a matching Skyforged steel sword for one i scored, and ran around for a while hotkeyed both L&R on #1 just fine.

Went and worked them to (superior), then I could only hotkey one at a time and even then it kept forgetting the binding! F^%$^!

edit:
seems like others are sharing my grief -
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=26391665

It seems that sharpening weapons very slightly increases the quality of the next one, so even tho they both are "superior" at first glance, they are very slightly different. Or something. So they dont do the L&R hotkey thing anymore, as they did pre-sharpen when completely identical. Sounds like a plausible theory. Stupid tho, they need to take care of this, it really messes up the flow of combat to be digging around in inventory because my victim did not die from the arrow and is now in my face!

It's too late for me bro, RUN!!! RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN!!! Don't let Steam patch it. Steam will do nasty things to the game and laugh the whole time.

Seriously, I'm not playing it for awhile. Had to patch Terraria and now I'm stuck with a patched Skyrim. So I'll let it go till they fix some of the more glaring issues. I'm fine with the UI, it's the damn crashing I want fixed and if the resistances are FUBARed then I want that fixed before I play as well.

I patched last night and had no troubles. It fixed some problems I had been having, too. You can use Steam to back up the game before you patch it.

Before patch i was having the usual not-so-important bugs in some quests, but overall was all very stable.

After the patch i am having stuttering and "jerkiness" while moving the mouse, and i'm having lower framerates in cities when NPCs are around.

Thing is, i have the same graphic drivers, the same .ini files, same mods, etc - the only thing that changed was the patch.

So i guess somewhere along the patching process or the patch itself something "non-important" changed that broke my game.


Fortunately i discovered the program DXtory to cap my frame rate at 59FPS and fixed the movement in game completely, VERY smooth now, no stuttering.

I patched, I had no choice. Even tho I had "do not auto-update" selected, it still fired up and even tho paused the update, still wouldnt let me play the game until complete.

Hotkeys still borked. Didnt play enough to notice performance issues yet, I'll have to play tonight but bummed that they didnt give me the choice. I really hope this doesnt turn into a negative experience.

I'll probably wait till next week's patch to turn steam back on. I'm having fun, don't care about achievements, and can live with a few broken quests.

Something is seriously wrong with this Steam model of patching.

Why is it if you purchased the game a broken "patch" is forced upon you and then you have to jump through hoops if you wish to revert it? It's not right, and once again the customer is treated badly for something they bought. There should be a simple way to revert the patch.

This trying to curb piracy thing is getting asinine and out of hand.

I've had this problem with Steam updating games as well despite my preferred setting option, and it's not so much that it's forced (well, most of the time). I investigated (and tested) a bit, and discovered that when you set Steam to "Do not update automatically", then hit "close", the setting is saved only during that login session. But when you log out of Steam and reopen the program, it resets itself to "Keep this game up to date" (this doesn't always seem consistent, but happens 2/3 times for me).

Rather annoying (seems like a bug), but I haven't encountered too many issues since the patch (though the resistances glitch is a hard pill to swallow when you're playing a mage).

I heard the "dragons flying backwards" glitch can actually break the main quest somewhere toward the end. I won't spoil anything, but let's just say a certain shout becomes useless because a certain NPC won't do what it's told to do.

I've been out a for over a week and haven't played at all. My last play was starting the game with version 1.1, playing through the intro, then playing for about 1 hour after that ending with getting my butt whopped by the big spider in the first dungeon you are sent to.

Since then, I guess patch 1.2 came out and much whaling and nashing of the teeth across all of the internet is now in full swing. I haven't experiened any bugs yet (again, v1.1) but I really don't want to deal with broken quests so I think I'll just shelve Skyrim and take a look at the situation again early next year. I'm a patient gamer.

I guess I'm off to try out the new Zelda game in the meantime.

I saw my first backwards, sideways, upways, downways, and occasionally slowly spinning dragon today. Let's hope they have a patch-patch soon.