This conflict seems to have claimed everyone's passions of late...

I wouldn't go that far. I'm sure with only several hours of training, you can learn at least a basic understanding of archery, or swordsmanship, or magic (if it existed in real life). In real life the time investment to become progressively better would grow exponentially, but if it was impossible to see any sort of gains early on, I doubt anyone would be motivated to do anything, and the human race would be gone.

People use the "if it was realistic, you wouldn't want to play it!" argument as a cop out. No, we don't want a game to emulate real life 100%. To say that we do is to strawman.

Progressive difficulty as skills increase was already suggested by someone, I think it is a good idea. I think that if we could see the skills increase (but not the stats) that it would still work out. I would be fine if the human race went extinct, my character is a dark elf with a bad attitude, lol.

No, you can use it as soon as you get your hands on that book. And it's easy/natural access because it's located in a rich ore mine that's very close to Whiterun.



Ermm it's not really that one sided. A very well made dagger can take much greater skill than some ordinary armor. That's why you see a simple steel swords going up to $5000 because of their craftmanship (pretty well made full plate goes around $2k ~ $3k). Making nothing but iron dagger is obviously counter intuitive idea to learn more, but only going after the most complex armor then throwing away all materials is just as counter intuitive.

I'm thinking about this and I think it would have made a lot more sense if blacksmith perk tree was divided into weapons and armors, or into two completely different perk trees as weapon smithing and armor smithing.



I just want to point out that this is rather weird you are quoting me on this outside of the context of the message I was replying to, because it's very context sensitive.

Within the context, my point was that it takes a very particular playstyle to stay low level and weak. Almost any attempt to make a character who is skillful in combat is going to trivialize the combat. So in order to successfully roleplay and stay weak, you essentially end up roleplaying a weakling, which is particularly narrow style of roleplaying in a game where you are suppose to be THE dragonborn.

HA! I like this answer!

I was exaggerating to make a point. All games have to balance out realism vs playability (often hardware and software limited). How the developers do that makes a big difference in the game.

Personally I like much more realism than this currently game provides. One of the first non-cosmetic mods I will use is one to make eating, sleeping and drinking required. I will use open cities and other similar mods.

I am quite sure that someone will mod changes to the smithing and enchanting skills to make progression more difficult. I will use that mod also. As an ex-SCA armorer and fighter I had no problem with having to repair armor and weapons that was in earlier Elder Scrolls games. I prefer Duke Patrick's combat mods because he actually knows how to fight.

Smarter AI for NPC's would also improve the game. Done right, it might actually make the game too hard for most people. Imagine that the warrior you are fighting spams healing potions, or that the mage runs away and heals to full and uses a restore magic potion. Suppose people run away when they know you are beating them, and then come back later with friends while you are sleeping. That would be fun.

Cheers!
Argenthart

Why are people arguing if it is too easy or too hard and why it is too easy or too hard? It does not matter the reason why people think it is too easy or too hard. What matters is that there are an overwhelming large amount of people who say that the game is too easy and wish that there were options within the game to make the game harder (than Master allows) on a consistent level (Master proves a little challenging until you hit your 20s for example). I will reiterate this, it does not matter if you agree with them at all. The game does need to allow the player to have more control over the difficulty of the game. It does not matter that I can get crazy powerful, I should be able to do that. I should also be able to have an enjoyable time and be challenged without having to impose arbitrary rules on myself. That is not asking for much and absolutely does not conflict with how you or anyone else plays their game.

Why? An overwhelming amount of people are playing the game that was developed, without expectations that the developers should have made it the way some think it should have been done. I would not be surprised if any number of these concerns came up in development. I think its wrong to assume it didn't and unfortunately they had to make decisions on what they could reasonably implement. I don;t think the attitude of "they made it for us" is reasonable either. They made it to be played knowing full well it wouldn't match everyone's expectations. In the end it is their game and their vision. one they wanted to share with us.

The game needs balancing if you must self gimp yourself in order to get a good challenge

:D

It is their responsibility. They made the game.



What you don't seem to understand is... nobody cares. "It was always bad so it can stay bad" is a nonsensical argument.

Hey, by the way, you know what else TES games have always been? Games with character stats.

Another thing that I didn't see you mention is groups of enemies actually using teamwork. The Blooded Vampire's Bandit Marauder going toe to toe with you is bloodied? Have the vampire heal it. Going after the vampire? Have the raised Bandit bash you, interrupt your power attacks, and otherwise just get in your way.

Seems like it's not very realistic to be able to continually improve your smithing skill for example by making the same exact item over and over. If you're the best person in the realm at making leather bracers, you're not going to be a better smith than Eorlund.

Exactly. And while this is hard to fix entirely, they can at least offer incentive to craft other items instead, and just generally change the system to make it feel more intuitive.

Seriously though, if a fully buffed warrior would have the challenge people want (the ones saying its too easy), I'd be terrified wearing less than heavy armor.

If they made both the armor types in the game viable, you wouldn't have to be. Or maybe you would when it came to going toe to toe, but in that case, Light Armor should offer another incentive.

Not a problem for me since I role play. No character I've ever made has a legitimate reason to make 10,000 daggers.

Lucky me I guess.

Well......not unless you don't happen to have ingots. My char often makes helmets and bracers made from the hides she gets from hunting. If she hasn't found ingots on her most recent adventure, she's going to craft what she can and get those hides the heck out of her inventory.

But she NEVER buys the materials. You don't make money that way and that, in my mind, is power leveling.

And like I've said more than once now, that's not the only way to get smithing to 100 without cheating. Hard to believe, I know.

Their dissatisfaction however does not impact yours. It is not unreasonable for people to use a forum to express why they are dissatisfied with a particular product. Further, offering up suggestions how to fix this is reasonable. When enough people share the same dissatisfaction, to any person with a lick of common sense, this should send up a red flag. If your target audience for a product says they would prefer oranges, but you sell apples - maybe offering up apples is a good idea. This isn't a case of offering up apples or oranges, it is simply offering up both apples AND oranges. Of course the product will not match everyone's expectations in every aspect. This is a very simply and a very easy to fix issue.

To simply defend the product and say "this is their vision, if you don't like it tough!" is for lack of a better word, idiotic.

As a matter of fact, my sneak archer is only at 80 smithing at level 41. And she crafts the hide of every freaking animal she shoots into leather armor and sells it. And in hindsight, I think my smithing is only that high because I probably didn't RP as good as I could have. She should have cut back on the animal shooting/smithing as her success as a thief/adventurer started to impact her wealth in a positive way. Can't undo what I've already done but I can't really RP a reason for her to smith another thing for sale when at this level, she's finding ebony swords in dungeons that go for BIG septims.

So you are arguing that because you RP, Smithing does not have an adverse effect on your game. Therefore, your solution is that everybody else conform and play like you do so Smithing does not have an adverse effect on their game. Great suggestion. Really.

Oh I do love me some hypocrisy.

Which is part of the problem.

I've played games that were so brutally hard that they fit this criterion to a 't', and am very glad that TES did not go in this direction because the inevitable result of extreme difficulty is extreme contraction of viable builds. Unfortunately for those seeking additional challenge (I am occasionally one such, depending on RP), the decision to not go down this path meant that the game would ultimately be too easy, even on the highest difficulty setting.

That said, there are some opponents that can give even the best-equipped warrior a run for his money, however they do so by being near-instant (or outright instant, if on higher settings) death to pretty much anything else, which itself is often considered to be bad design. It's pretty much a no-win scenario for the developers; no matter what they do to increase difficulty it's going to cause problems, but at the same time there will be problems if you don't do anything to increase it.

You're just rehashing the same points that people have made over and over again, in this thread and others. If they haven't figured that by now, they're not going to.

These may be reasonable requests to you, or someone else, but not necessarily to the developers. And yes, if you don't like it, tough. You are not obligated to like everything, nor should you expect everyone to address all your concerns. With what authority can you say these are easy fixes. You can criticize, that is your right.