Good lord, 51 people replied to my fruitless rant? I envisioned my OP being like a man screaming into the wilderness, unheard and futile. But lo and behold you all cared!
A "rant" is never "fruitless".Is the way it is expressed that sometimes is wrong.
So, to be fair, I love this game and love Bethesda: in Oblivion my main has completed all the quest lines, the Knights and Sheogorath content, too. But I think that this would not have happened without Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul and the repairs it made to the base game. I ran about 20 mods on Oblivion and don't recall any major bugs despite the fact that Bethesda was uninterested in repairing problems (past a certain point.)
even Oblivion -like all Bethesda products so far -had its bugs; perhaps you were "lucky"" then and "unlucky" now...it's a game,it can happens, to everyone.
Thus my rage when big quest lines like the Mages College and the Companions are broken. And believe me, I spent hours poring over the internet looking for solutions to either problem, and I did reload and try over - many times. The closest thing to actual advice was to advance the main quest and it might unlock the Mages questline. So I did the main up to Anduin's Wall and returned and DAGNABBIT now there is an iron gate across the walkway when I fast travel to the College. Yadda yadda yadda, whine whine whine. Why should you care?
The reality is that I am hooked on Skyrim and will log back in and play, and use the console to skip hunks of content.
Now if anyone actually has any advice on why these damn quests bugged -- please tell me. That would be more useful than telling me to svck it up.
Only Bethesda can tell you eventually "why" these quests are bugged
however all of us have already tell you the things to do to "avoid" this bugs:- do extensive research on this forum and the net to find possible solutions- start a new game/character to do the "broken quests" - use the console commands if you are impelled to proceed with this character But no,you prefer instead
asking others to do eventually the "job" for you.Anyway, I never had the slightest expectation of Steam refunding my money, but I can't think of another way to register my dismay.
Strange,because you've said exactly this on your first post:
So just give me my money back, I'm giving up.
You "love the game", played it for 88 hours (and still playing i suppose) "never had the slightest expectation of Steam refunding your money"
BUT still you've started a topic here asking for a spurious "refund". All that i can say is that I'm contrite to have replied to you,even if i was only "ironically" at first glance.