I, like countless other players, am permanently stuck with the miscellaneous quest "Visit the College of Winterhold" because of talking my way through and saying I'm Dragonborn, rather than completing the spell test. And by all accounts, according to XBox and PC players, even after patch 1.6 this is still not fixed so I one would have to assume it wasn't fixed for PS3 either. This is enough to make me start over even after putting 150 hours into my character, but of course I will stop playing Skyrim altogether before I do that. Life is too short to waste that kind of time starting over just because developers are too lazy and incompetent to release a properly working game, or to even fix it after several patches.

I admit I am no game developer, but it seems to me that this would be an extremely simple thing to correct, I can think of several things they could do to simply remove this damn quest from my quest log, but I would be willing to bet a week's pay that they never fix it.

Some may think this is not a good enough reason to stop playing, but I do not share that view. This is an RPG...HELLO? the whole point is immersion and having things work correctly. I don't care how "huge" the game is, which is Bethesda's excuse for so many broken things, if the game is too "huge" for them to fix everything, then they'd better scale down their games and start making games that they can HANDLE.

And of course, they will not tell us whether or not they ever plan on fixing it...but common sense and their track record would tell you they never will.

And no, I can't go back and start at an earlier point to re-do it, that was eons ago and that save no longer even exists. You cannot keep an infinite number of saves, and who wants to have 5000 saves taking up all their hard drive space anyway? Skyrim is not the only game I play. And I was expecting that they would eventually fix it in one of the patches but I've lost that hope at this point, after how many patches?

You'll have to forgive me if I seem a little bitter, I am. I spent $60 on this game and have put 150 hours into it. I don't appreciate this.

No one apperciates being lied to. And that is what Beth sold the game on lies.

Not fixed on the 360 or pc either and I have both, getting really annoyed about all these stuck quests, I'm a major completionist and I need these removed! The only quest I wanna see in my quest log at end game is the nightmothers repeatable quest because it never gets removed as she always gives you your next target right after the last one.

I don't think they fix the larceny items either. Once you get the last of the larceny items, you can't return it to Delvin. How did they miss that? It's an "in your face" bug that can't be avoided.

Well they are pretty consistent at missing "In your face" bugs, let's face it, in patch 1.5 one of it's main focii was an improvement to water effects from above and below. It goes wild and we crash when entering the water, I'd call that a huge "In your face" bug, yet it got past the errr, ahem, QA process.

When they can drop a clanger like that, then it's not that surprising that bug ridden scripted quests will be pretty common, as is the case unfortunately for the gamers.

Beth clearly does 0 in the way of alpha testing. And the finished product is shipped in that fasion.

After the nightmare that is Skyrim, I'm more inclined to believe this. I firmly believe the only testing Bethesda does, is done by the developers themselves and internal staff of Bethesda. These "testers" since they all work for Bethesda have a bias towards the game, and probably very easily overlook their shoddy craftsmanship. I firmly believe Todd Howard when he said they were running automated games 24 hours a day to "test" for bugs. It's cheap it saves them money, and it keeps them from getting their feelings hurt by outside professional game testers, who would have torn this game apart and forced it to miss 11-11-11.

Not being a programmer I have no idea how a 24 hour a day automated test would even work.

However I have a feeling none of the reports were looked at. It's almost like the printout was fed directly into a paper shreadder. "Yes we tested it look at all of this waste we produced."

I'm no programmer either, but it's not very hard to figure out that running automated games 24 hours a day lacks 1 critical factor when it comes to finding bugs. The Human factor, you can tell a computer program to run games for a century and it will probably never find any bugs, because without the human factor you basically have a machine going through the motions.

There are two basic components to software testing, automated or otherwise: unit tests and integration testing.

Unit testing is easily automated and simply verifies compliance of a unit of code against a specification. The specification is written by a person and is typically just more code that instantiates or calls a piece of code and then does some operation to it, checks its output or parameters against expected results and barfs if there is a mis-match.

Integration testing happens when you start putting systems together, this is usually more difficult to automate because there are often limits in the test harness' ability to abstract components of the software (like disk access or a bluetooth device). You can create stand-in models that give expected results for different conditions to fill in for the real hardware.

What I don't understand, and I would be amazed if they did, is how they could have randomized the automated games progress. Like jumping around doing different quests. Dropping the odd item, killing off an NPC for a quest etc etc, and then how did they anolyze the results? Just looking at the end-test game state you could miss some of the important performance issues we see. Not to mention that identifying the failures and sifting through the megadata that this could create would be onerous at best.

I think its unlikely they worked up so complex a test harness anyway.

So presumably, the 24 hour automated games were running through a list of quests. Perhaps they were re-ordered in some of the games but I more likely believe that they had in a pool of games some sets running the MQ, then CoW, then DB sort of linearly progressing through each story line.