To lay it out clearly for those of you who aren't going to follow in my stealthy footsteps, here's what i would do / am planning on doing to create effective builds of the other two archetypes:

For mage, i'd focus on ENCHANTING as my core skill, almost exclusively until about level 10-12. The compensatory power of the enchants on weapons and armor, coupled with base destruction/alteration/conjuration spells, should easily get you through those early levels. When the game starts to require greater damage output and survivability of you, start putting as few perks as possible into the other schools in order to get the most essential abilities only. So, in my opinion, these would be Impact and Augmented damage in Destruction, and Mage Armor in Alteration. You would also get the mana cost reduction perks only when absolutely necessary, or as prerequisites. Enchanting, of course, can be used to create armor and items to help you gain mana/health, or use less mana, while also increasing your other magical skills, in addition to creating killer enchanted weapons if you're doing a battlemage (i might just use a few good staves).

For a warrior... hmmm... i think i might actually do SMITHING (see a pattern in the logic, here), although some have said it is very overpowered (sneak might be, as well). I'd perk smithing pretty much until about level 8-10, then go out with better armor and weapons and the rest of my skills without perks and let the quality of the gear compensate. After assessing combat effectiveness, i'd perk into other skills as needed, for example to reduce stamina cost of power attacks, or to unlock special abilities like shield bash, leaving the base perks at rank 1/5.

The key is finding that core skill that greatly facilitates everything else you'll be doing; sneak for stealth characters, and most likely enchanting for mages and smithing for warriors. At some point, you'll be rolling relatively smoothly with the solid core archetypal build and tight, focused perk spending (somewhere around level 16, at least for my stealther), and from there you should be able to start branching out into hybrid builds if you want, or just maximizing the archetype).

If you play on PC, there are a multitude of fixes out there right now for many of the common problems that people are facing with their game.

Just a matter of finding it is all.

new vegas was one of the buggiest launches ever

The only problem that irks me is the fact that the PS3 version ahs serious lag issues once you hit 6 MB of data or so on the cache.

Oh, and after completing the Companion questline, I returned to Jorrvaskr, saw Vilkas and trained a bit. Went adventuring and gained a level ,so I went back for more 2H training. Bam. Vilkas is nowhere to be found. Not even the quest marker for "ask the Companion leaders for work" will point his location out to me. All the while, the ungodly ugly girl in Jorvaskr is constantly saying "What guidance could you possibly have for me?!" And I'm thinking: I want to beat her to a pulp; I am the Kodlak. I demand respect!

Other than those (and the last one I don't think is actually a bug), I am satisfied with Skyrim. I am almost overwhelmed actually. So much so that I started my 5th character today after 68 hours on the old one. Idk why, but there was so much I had to accomplish at once that I threw him out. Now, I am gonna take it slow with my new character

Sounds like the OP needs more skill in Illusion.

You have SLI there. Do you mean crossfire? If so, maybe try simplifying things by running with only one card, and downgrading options to low or medium to see if that helps with stability.

I got out of Whiterun by lowering my settings to low. It was damn pathetic to. Here I have a fairly decent PC system and I have to play a game on its lowest friggin settings. Totally takes away from the immersion of the game. I finally uninstalled the game and reinstalled it. Started a new game after installing some mods. Everything seemed to work fine --until I walked out of the cave, watched the black dragon fly away overhead; took about three steps and the game crashed to the desktop. :banghead:
Game developers would like us to pay more for their games and we do. Every time a new game comes out we have to upgrade our PC's or consoles that cost hundreds of dollars. If we want to play the game then we have to [censored] money and lots of it.

another pointless whine thread ^^

The only problem I have sometimes is accessing the in game menu, because it try's to auto save. Are you sure your computer can run the game?

Good for you, I'm getting tired of all the "but it works for me" replies.
Game is heavily bugged on a broad selection of rigs, both high and low performance ones.
What's an "user error"? playing the damn game?

Dont tell me that doesn't sound wrong, even to yourself?

There is an awful lot of negative feelings going around. I can't say I know what glitches or bugs your talking about, I so far haven't CTD a single time, and I'm finding the game surprisingly stable with fairly few bugs. Still, what do you expect from a new game? Bugs are found more by us than by testing teams, we have more time and a broader imagination to try stuff they didn't think of. There is also more time for the players to run through things repeatedly, where the testing teams have limited time.

It's a shame the companies are morried about release dates then solid working project. If this piece of software was a car, they would have recalled it by now and/or have massive lawsuits against them for the shoddy work.

The game is not finished and should not have been released for at least 3 - 6 months while they actually worked out the bugs and did more work on balance/playability for different systems.

Most likely the last Bethesda title I will buy and most of my friends feels the same way.

Why don't more game companies learn from Blizzard .. DONT RELEASE IT UNTIL IT'S READY!!!!!

Your loss to stop playing bethesda games because they have bugs, what do you expect when there is a massive level of content? Aside from that, bugs will ALWAYS be present, partly due to differences in equipment, and partly to individual play style that was not thought of.

One advantage with steam is that you can "check" your installation if you have problem with the game.

I think that goes across the board. lol. shadows are awful, but it doesn't matter much to me.

Not had many problems tbh. For me, it's suprisingly relatively bug-free and stable.

I've maybe had 2-3 random exit to desktops, and 1 serious system restart crash in 70 hours.

Then you should not read them or respond to them. That being said, I am a bit of a non conformist and tend to say what I think--good, bad or indifferent. Besides, the fact that I spent money on game that should have worked right out of the box; IMOP. In addition, given the technology advances today there is no excuse, period! It all boils down, IMOP, to the fact that all companies today are more concerned about making their investors happier than their customers; or consumers. Free market, fair trade and all that other BS.

I am not justifying buggy releases, but you should never buy a game day 1. You have to wait merely 1 day to read on forums what problems (if any) gamers are having and what they are saying before making a decision to purchase the game. You can save yourself a lot of dissapointment and send a message to developers a message via your wallet that you expect more quality in a release.

There are several people having issues with this game.. I had my first CTD yesterday after many hours of gameplay but that has been my only one. And I hope it's my last. But otherwise the game has been rock solid and I have enjoyed hour after late night hour.

I've encountered only two really serious bugs, I was able to overcome both.

The quest where you have to enter Nightcaller Temple ... the NPC quest-giver has to enter with you ... first time I entered, he was nowhere to be found - not inside and not outside of the building. Luckily, I had a savegame just before entering and after reloading twice, it worked ... could have been a serious bug otherwise (but then again, there are so many quests, if one is buggy, do others until a patch solves the problem).

Second one was quest for mages guild in Mzulft. I killed the Falmer who had a quest item with a dragon shout - he was knocked backwards right INTO the stairs and vanished into the stairs. I had to use tcl (=toggle collision off) to also walk into the stairs and get the item.

There is a problem with how Skyrim handles memory allocation. OSes at their base are handled by a kernel. Think of it like the Cop of the system. He makes sure all the programs are running in ways that won't damage the system and aren't fighting with each other, and follow secure procedures. Skyrim starts up as a 32-bit executable. The system kernel sees this and says, "Alright skyrim, you can have this space of memory to work with. It starts at block 003774A1", and gives it access to 2 GB. The game doesn't seem to realize that it's limited by this however and check the total system memory instead. At some point while you're playing the game wants to allocate a certain resource to a memory space. It sees that certain spaces are already taken up, checks how much memory there is and decides to allocate a space outside the 2GB range assigned by the kernel. The kernel sees this and says "Whoah buddy I never gave you permission to do that, I'm shutting this operation down." Cue CTD without any warning.

The LAA patch makes it so that the kernel sees the executable and instead of giving it 2 GB he says "Oh looks like you can handle 4GB, sounds fine by me, here's the space" As it is now, Skyrim is unlikely to hit the 4GB mark without an extremely large amount of modding or if the game had a memory leak of some sort. It's just below 2 GB under normal operation, but if the game fails to deallocate some parts when they're not in use, it can easily hit that 2 GB mark and call down the wrath of the kernel.

Sadly this is part and parcel of being a PC gamer. Patches will come out and hopefully solve most of the issues. I know that doesn't soothe the anger much but /shrug.

As for those decrying the state of PC patching post release. The companies that produce these games spend huge amounts of money in their development and they do, in the vast majority of cases, test the games throughly on a variety of PC setups, however there is no way they could test all possible hardwre configurations, it is doubtful they could even test all 'common' PC builds without inflating their budget to the point that consoles 'would just be less hassle and more profit'. That doesn't even take into account software conflicts, or user errors. The vast majority of people seem to be playing the game without any major issues.
Now don't get me wrong there are companies out there who do skimp on the testing phase, and I have no doubt that more errors are being pushed out to meet deadlines than before due to internet access becoming far more common, but remember with each passing year the number of software / hardware configurations increases hugely.
I feel more for the console market with errors (such as the current PS3 save game issue), as that is 1 configuration to be developed for, but it will always be the case if you want stability play on a console.

Then Bethesda should fix the damn thing immediately if not sooner. Incidentally, I read were this LAA Patch has crashed a lot of systems?!?

Poor little doves.

When something works well for at least 99% of its users, it's not broken. There could be many reasons for it not to work well on your computer, and it's the computer's fault, and quite likely an incompatibility issue with something.

Just search for the ways other people solved their similar problems instead of whining and blaming developers. Hell, their game has less of those issues than most others, but it's quite impossible to make a game that works perfectly on every single computer ever.

By the way, just saw a thread with good ways to fix some problems like yours, this morning or yesterday night. You should check them out.

Not sure why this bug's still prevalent. It was known about in Oblivion's time too.(Most people never ran into it because Obliv doesn't take as much RAM and it was people with a sizeable number of mods that ran into it)
Haven't heard of it adversely affecting anyone's machine. All it does is set a flag on the executable that it can handle 4 GB.

It's not necessary if you only have 2GB in your system.

As a side note, if you have a 32-bit system, you'll also have to set the 3 GB flag too. This patch is mainly for people with 64-bit Windows and 4GB or greater memory.