Faelwolf

Doing fantastic, we've finally managed to pay down our bills enough that the wife thinks she can budget the rehab on my motorcycle this year, so feeling pretty pumped. It's had to sit for years now, not going to require a rebuild, but will take a lot of "fiddly" work to get her going again. I had a major heart attack years ago, and the bike had to sit un-prepped for storage while I went through the whole ordeal. By the time I got back on my feet, between sudden forced retirement cutting my income 60% with no reduction in bills, along with life in general, I couldn't get her going again. Going to go through her front to back, and should be back on the road by June. At this point it's going to take new tires, and battery (major costs) then carb cleaning, oil, fluids, and the usual culprits, but very doable once the big three are bought. (And the big three have been the biggest sticking point) Can only get one a month, but much better than the none I could get before! My big advantages are I had just put Sea-Foam in the tank and filled her up right before I got sick to do my annual minor fuel system cleanout, so tank shouldn't have issues from drawing damp, and she was due for new tires anyway so I don't have to swap out tires I didn't get to put any miles on. I'll take what I can get at this point! Yeah, my cardiologist isn't happy about it, but he can just deal

Well I am not complaining about it too much, I did get XP twice for the "same" fox Just thought it was odd, your explanation makes sense, I had assumed the loss of a star was due to shooting it twice and damaging the pelt by it. I really wish they'd fix the disconnects so I can play again.

I had an interesting experience along these lines the other day. I headshot a fox at fairly close range, he went down and I got the kill xp. Then he got up, ran a short distance (and eagle eye gave me the red track). I followed him across a small bridge to find him standing there. Another head shot, kill xp again, and this time he stayed down. I was then able to pick him up and place on my horse. He did go from a 2 star to a 1 star. I put it down to just another server glitch.

Until they fix the constant disconnects, none of these bonuses have any value to me. It has gotten to the point that I am lucky to be able to spend more than 5-10 minutes in the game after log in. I'll log in to find myself a mile away from camp, as usual, after selecting the "camp" option, and disconnect before I can even get to camp with the animals I collect along the way. No missing animal issue for me yet, but it does me no good when I lose everything to a disconnect anyway. Taking a break from the game until I hear that the issue is fixed. A friend just gifted me GTA V on steam, can get some shooting practice in there while I wait.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but I haven't logged on yet to not be tripping over game, or up to my butt in alligators in Bayou Nwa to the point I won't go in any direction without checking with eagle eye first. Maybe a PC thing? I've heard that PC numbers are comparatively low right now. (Doesn't seem to be any shortage of jerks around Blackwater though.)

Am I the only one who read the title and thought "walk into a bar.........."

Between the holiday, Twitch Prime, and WR club, my camp box is stuffed with food, specialty ammo, tonics and other sundries, my pistol is updated to the Navy from the money I saved/was given, and I have a nice scoped bolt action rifle for hunting, let alone the collector role for free, all by level 11, and I'm a (currently very casual) PC player. Couldn't be happier other than finding a good group of friends to run with and a few bug fixes. What more goodies are you talking about? Not greedy for more, but curious.

Just putting this out here for what it's worth, if anything. Before I started the trader role, little to no issues with my camp. The same day I bought the butcher table and initiated the trader role, I began to have the issues reported by so many others. Possibly related to the code for the butcher table? I can't say as I haven't written code since the days of COBOL (ask your grandparents kids) but I find the timing very interesting.

I'm running into the opposite problem. Can't even place my camp in the bayou due to all camp slots being filled. Not seeing many players, but getting the log in lag, and limited camp slots, so they must be around somewhere.

This is the year I am going to teach myself to TIG weld, and finish up my blacksmith shop. All that is left is to build the forge, which I have managed to acquire the parts and materials for over time, then I can get back in practice by forging the rest of the small amount of tooling I still need. I bought the welder, a very nice stick/TIG unit, a couple years ago, but due to some health and other issues (seems like something always requires your time and money when you start to get ahead) and hurricane Michael, am just now back in a position to mess with it. Frankly, I am making the time to mess with it! My father-in-law bought me a very nice auto darkening helmet for Christmas, and the wife has budgeted a tank of gas next month (just a couple weeks at this point) for me to start learning the TIG end of it. By the end of the year, the plan is to be up and running and bringing in a little side income as a money making hobby if I can. Wife doesn't know it, but a smokehouse and an outdoor wood fired kitchen/bread oven are in the works, too. (She still hasn't figured out why I scrounged up some extra 1/4" plate and all that stone) Going to be a busy but fun year if I have anything to say about it!

heh! I think it's more a prudish aversion to naughty bits. You can show a man get his brains blown out in graphic detail and get a PG rating, but let some svelte young thing flash her generous bouncy bits, and it's a hard R. The problem with Deadwood wasn't some bad language, the problem was practically every other word being profane. It lost it's "shock value" very quickly, then became tiring. It's a shame, as otherwise the writing and story line wasn't so bad, what I could stand to watch of it. Just like today, on the frontier course language wasn't unknown or unexpected, but Deadwood took it way too far. In my circles such a large amount of foul language is seen as a sign of insecurity and weakness. Back in the day, it was seen in an even lower view. I am no prude, I come from a Navy family, worked in corrections for a few years, and am ex-military, I am no stranger to course language! BTW, another trope that is common today that would not be tolerated back then is a two-gun man. Anyone seen wearing a double pistol rig like some movies and TV shows (and a certain game we all love) would have been flagged as a trouble maker or an outlaw from the get-go, and would have been harassed in every town. The "Wild West" was a lot tamer than is commonly portrayed. I was a Victorian Era re-enactor and Living History demonstrator back in my younger, healthier days. I still have a lot of tolerance for historical errors in movies and TV shows, they are just entertainment after all, so don't think I am just nitpicking Deadwood to be a "button counter". It got a lot of things right, I just feel it was ruined by the language decision. I am not the only one, it was brought up numerous times by critics and fans alike when it was airing. For language (and lots of other small details within reason for a TV show) look to Hell on Wheels for a more accurate portrayal of the Old West. Though it is still a TV show, and puts more action in one episode than a real person would have probably seen in a year. If you want to see how actually boring, stressful, and more-or-less uneventful the Old West really was, watch "Meeks Cutoff" if you can stay awake through it.

Just my initial thoughts for what it's worth: Finally got the download to finish this morning. WOW! Definitely going to back this up to an external hard drive, don't want to go through that again! I would definitely like to see a DVD set made available for those of us stuck with DSL. Started the game a bit nervously after hearing about all the issues, and knowing how outdated my system is. Pleasantly surprised to have it launch without a hitch. Game installer's chosen settings seem to be a perfect match for my old system, surprising mix of low to ultra, but it works so am not touching it unless I am forced to. Character creation was interesting, I am not great at this, definitely no career as a character designer in my future, but ended up with a character I liked well enough. I am always impressed with those who can make their character look just like Lee Van Cleef or something. I struggle not to look like a circus freak! The "story" mode of it was a nice touch I thought. The Good: Launched into online play (Saving offline for the week-long internet outages we have around here at times) Picture quality better than I expected, even on my old system the level of detail is amazing at times. Fog is not just a haze hanging in the air, it actually moves and billows like the real thing. NPCs react to my character in differing and realistic ways. Animals actually react to me too, not just standing there waiting for me to play the usual MMO whack-a-mole. Heck, I even startled a frog that leapt away from me in the swamp! Overall the world has some real depth. No auto-target and target lock either. Limited fast travel, food really matters and isn't just a stat buff, none of the gimmicks modern MMO's rely on so heavily. Feels like a world that requires me to make my way in it. This is going to be a fun challenge. The cut scenes were well written and acted, I have seen much worse movies in theaters. Well done! The Bad: Initial tutorial missions leave something to be desired. This game doesn't (and shouldn't) hand hold a new player the whole way, but there should be a mini pre-tutorial applicable to either game-play mode, to help with learning the controls, and more step-by-step of the basics. The tutorial mission wants me to follow an NPC on my horse, when I don't even know the key binds to change speed, etc. I am not asking for total long-term hand-holding, but they made the learning curve pretty steep, which could put some new players off. My first gun fight is against multiple opponents, when I haven't even figured out how to brandish a weapon and aim! If nothing else give us a small practice area, and add a target range and ammo, and work into the story that they are giving us a change to limber up after being out of action for a while, or something. Some social aspects could use improving as well, it seems hard, at least at this point, to get together on the map with friends in this game if you don't have a persistent posse camp to log into. (And I am not at the point yet to know if that's even possible.) The Ugly: The interface and key binds. This is a port from console, I get it, but the system is clunky and counter-intuitive in places. It feels jumbled, and unnecessarily complicated at times, there seems to be little consistency to the layouts. Added to this you have to remember if it's a tap or hold, etc. It feels like they just tried to substitute keys for controller buttons rather than create a true PC UI. This seems to be a trend with console ports, I'd have like to have seen Rockstar break out of the mold on this one. I would feel better served if my health, stamina, and deadeye icons were in a row along either the top or bottom of the screen, and always visible, with a separate similar set of persistent icons for my horse. Having them as a border around my mini-map slows data acquisition, and feels cluttered. Having to pull out my weapon to see them is annoying. I can lose health and stamina out of combat, I should be able to monitor them easily when out of combat as well. If there is an option to re-arrange the placement of the HUD items, I haven't found it yet, I'd definitely want to place them differently. I haven't included any bugs or glitches in this because those aren't design elements, and RockStar seems to be honestly working on at least most of them. I ran into a few minor ones, such as my hat lagging behind in cinematic mode, (I admit it, I chuckled) but nothing game-breaking so far. From what I read while waiting for my budget to allow me to purchase the game, plus the 3.5 day download (groan again) I have seen more action on the bugs from RockStar in the past month than some other larger game companies have done in years. So long as they keep up the honest effort, I can be much more forgiving of them than those other companies. In closing, I'd rate this game 8/10, the immersiveness and level of detail easily outweighs the UI/Key issues, IMO. Fix those, it would easily be a 10/10. The only remaining issue is that I am terrible at this game, but having so much fun right from the start that I will enjoying improving. Unlike some games, even low level doesn't feel like a chore, or feel like a slog I have to get through to get to the "good part" The day has flown by, and everything I learned or discovered felt like an accomplishment. I have already brought a friend into the game, and he is having as much fun as I am. This is definitely on my short list of games I'd recommend.

Hard to help pin it down without some system info to go on, but I'll speak in general terms. If on PC, most likely a driver issue. If you are using an Nvidia card, I suggest using the "Nvidia GEForce Experience" software and let it do the update (express). I have found it does a pretty good job of deleting the old drivers when it updates, no more manual search and destroy missions and registry editing. (I sure don't miss that) Nvidia has had 3 updates in the past 6 weeks, some of it aimed specifically at RDR2 I am told. Over the years I have dealt with this several times, and in my personal experience, it was usually either a driver conflict (old driver not completely removed and fighting for control of vid card) or an out of date driver. Another cause of this in my experience is settings that are too high for the available video memory on the card, but I poked around a bit earlier today and discovered that RDR2 won't accept settings that do this, so not a likely culprit unless you somehow found a way around the safeguard. YMMV.

Finally finished the download today, have been playing in fullscreen mode all day. Only issue I've had so far was one server side disconnect, and a lovely local power outage for about an hour (Disco could easily been caused by my less-than-reliable DSL) Using the settings the game set after install, keeping fingers crossed. With the hit-or-miss reports I keep reading for issues, I have to think it is certain combinations of CPU and video card, and to me it seems those cards with some of the more advanced features and the new physics modelling are having the most trouble, but I could easily be wrong. I wonder if we should start a thread of system specs and game play experience to see if a pattern begins to emerge. My system is ancient by today's standards (I7-920 @ 2.4 Ghz w/1050ti card, 24GB DDR3 RAM) and I haven't had a hitch. Surprising mix of low to ultra settings the game chose, too, and Vulcan API, didn't expect it to work so well. Frame rate is good, no hitching or stalls, picture quality is acceptable and better than I expected for my system specs. If anything does start acting up though, will give this a try first, thanks for the heads up!

Preferably without the over-the-top foul language though. (Despite any claims from the producers, that was not historically accurate, and anyone that foul mouthed would have been "encouraged" to move on rather quickly, even on the frontier.) I just couldn't watch the show because of it. It wears on me pretty quick.

Thanks for the info! For some reason I was thinking you had to be a trader to have a camp, don't know where that came from, maybe doing too much research and getting things jumbled together in this old noggin. I got notified this afternoon that our trip to father-in-laws house has been delayed to the 24th due to weather, so can grab the limited time box of goodies too. I have also discovered that the wife splurged and bought me the ultimate edition (she's never one to turn down a sale anywhere, and the sale price was about what she budgeted for the game, so yay me! ) and I am thinking the grizzly set (think that's what it's called) might be warm enough once I figure out how to get to the store to claim it, but nice to know I am gtg either way. I had thought she paid for the standard edition, so it's a nice surprise. With all this good news today, maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket.........

Right now I am still playing the "Download RDR2O before you die of old age" mini game. So my question is, with the "winter storm" what effect is that going to have on a new player who isn't going to have winter clothing just starting out? Also how would a new player claim all these items if they don't have a camp? Will the items be waiting for them once they level up enough to have a camp, or do we just lose out until next year's goodies?

That could make for a new frontier pursuit, Prospector. Could be an interesting one, too if done right.

IIRC that's because alt+F4 is a windows command, and you are being given Windows options (through task manager) to quit the program or let it continue, rather than in-game options. So no option to go back to game menu, because Windows wants to close the program entirely.

Mine's a very large desktop, I don't have a laptop that would even begin to play the game. The desktop is technically not powerful enough either, but I have seen a vid from someone with the same specs playing the game with no issue, and I have been very adept over the years getting things to work. I have thought of possibly doing a remote login, but don't think it will be worth the trouble and security risk for a few in-game trinkets.

I had a massive heart attack and was practically dead for a bit on Thanksgiving some years ago. Since then the wife gets pretty clingy around the holidays. Thanksgiving depends on how we feel, sometimes we travel to visit family, some years we don't. Christmas we take turns with different family as they are widely spread. This year it's the father-in-law's house in Alabama. No kids, so Christmas isn't a big deal around our house. Christmas is really for kids and family IMO. Other than that, pretty much another day. I am not much of one for decorating, but the wife does a bit.

Looks like I am going to miss out on the chest, will be out of town Dec 23-25, with no way to play. The other stuff looks nice, but since I will not likely have a role etc. I wonder if it will be held until I get there. Just now 25% of download, going to likely be 3+ days to finish it up and actually get in the game. DSL sucks!

Yeah, that's what I've been doing, reading up, watching videos, etc. especially stuff like "noob mistakes to avoid" etc. I have a friend who has picked up the game, but hasn't had a chance to do much yet, so already have a built-in partner to learn the ropes with. Looking forward to it!

Thank ye kindly. Launcher is already installed, had hoped to get a leg up on it, but at least now I know for sure. Only a few days away from being able to purchase the game now, so it's all good!

Lag and syncing issues are one of the two main reasons I generally avoid online PvP play. (The other is the toxic community most online PvP games tend to have these days, with hackers, cheaters, and general bad attitudes. The glory days of Aliens Online and the original CoD are gone.) Yeah, I'm old. You've been given some good advice here, report it, and move on. It may be cheating, it may not, often no real way to tell from your end, so let Rockstar investigate. Who knows? They get enough reports, they may find the cause and can make an update to help alleviate it, and if it's a hack, they can take care of the player and maybe block the hack. But they can't fix a problem they don't know about. On the other hand, lag has led to some truly memorable funny moments in my online gaming over the years!