I've toyed with the idea that although learn by doing is great, at the same time it doesn't make much sense to be doing low level things to continue increasing your skill. I.e. when you're at Journeyman at Restoration, you shouldn't be able to cast the cheapest Restoration spells to improve that skill, you should cast Journeyman level spells for it to count. I.e.:
* You don't become a master alchemist by mixing ice cream, but by going for the harder potions involving more risk.
* You don't become a master of blade by chopping onions, you should only get the increase when doing that particular perk move.

Some of these exploits were already removed in OB, i.e. that you don't get an increase by casting destruction at a wall, it has to be some enemy. But I think there is room for more improvements.

Agreed, in part. I think that higher level actions should give you more experience in the skill, but that lower level actions would still yield some exp, just much less of it, and all tailored to your current level.

Just make a simple level-of-difficulty vs experience-earned system.

Agreed. At higher levels you would have to achieve difficult potions for becoming master at alchemy. Searching for difficult ingredients...

As for potions, I think that they should make some ingredients harder to get and use a % based drop system to distribute those harder-to-get ingredients. Along with this, they should make only those more difficult potions confer experience at higher skill levels. This would insure that people don't spam restore fatigue potions to master alchemy and might allow the developers to add potions that do more interesting things later in the game.

Agreed. But I enjoyed grinding, I'm not sure why. I'd be sad if they made leveling too complex.

Yes, this bothered me as well.

I think each task should give your skills depending on the difficulty of the task compared to your skill level.

So if you are a low level sword man and kill a low level bandit, for each slash of the blade, you get decent amount of swordplay skill boost.

But if you are a really high level sword master and kill that bandit, you do not boost your sword-play skill, that much, as it would be below you.

If you are high level sword master and kill a high level foe with your blade, you get decent boost of your skill with each slash.

If you beginner sword man and manage to kill a high level foe with your blade, you would gain a lot of experience with your blade skill, and advance it a lot more than other situations.

This can apply to all other skills, like alchemy of your example.

Indeed seams like a reasonable improvment in the system. Why would I as a powerfull mage advance from 90 to 91 in Destruction by casting pittyfull first-year-at-the-academy spells?

You could improve your destruction by casting a spell against yourself. Was rather silly.

How much casting a spell increases your skill should depend on the Magicka cost of the spell. More expensive spells should increase your skill more than cheap ones.

Even so, destruction was ridiculously hard to level.

It's why I did it. I wanted to use Fingers of the Mountain.

If untrained/abandoned skills decreased, easy activities could work to prevent skills from decreasing at higher levels.

What bothered me was the Speechcraft skill in Oblivion. In the minigame, you could just press buttons randomly without even trying to increase the NPS's disposition, and you could still increase your speechcraft skill. That made no sense and really needs to be changed.

For alchemy, some kind of diminshed returns would be nice. Restore fatigue potions would give you good XP the first 50 potions, less XP until 100 potions, and then no XP after that.

So basically, making potions with different effects each time would level your alchemy quickly, just like making potions with rare effects (invisibility potions would for example get a 2x multiplier for your alchemy).

I like this, though it has been brought up before.

Actually I thought that in Oblivion Destruction and restoration was the easiest to level up in. Continually damage yourself with fire and then heal yourself with restoration. While it was easy to abuse I would rather it be left alone. If people want to abuse it, let them. It isn't hurting anyone that doesn't want to abuse it.

u sure it doesn't already do that in oblivion?

anyway i dont see the big problem here. If you want to level up sword skill the better u get at blade skill there more slashes it takes... weaker enemies take less slashes. therefore less experience. stronger enemies provide more slashes giving u more experience. same for destructive spells. And this will be something worth regretting for people who want to max out all their skills. It already takes forever as it is. Idk why you would want to make it any harder. I always try to max all my skills even if i pick a warrior class i will master w/e magic i can use. but if i had to use a really strong spell in order to level upi wuld never be able to do it seeing that i probably wont have enough mana to use it.

If they had skill failure again, I would suggest that they give skill experience only for failures (failures from die rolls, not player-induced failures). That would inherently tie them to difficulty, and would also mean that skill failure wouldn't be as unfun (which was one reason it was taken out to begin with, I assume). But I agree that the learn-by-use system needs to be reformed either way.

Hopefully they also ensure that all skills are actually useful without just using them for the hell of it or grinding them up. Acrobatics in particular -- I never felt like I really needed it for anything, except for the really high jumps which I couldn't do since my skill was way too low. And also they ensure that skill checks are very spread out in level -- I'd hate to have a system like Fallout where your lockpicking skill usefulness was fairly flat until you hit the next multiple of 25. There's no reason not to have a lock of difficulty 37 (or whatver) aside from laziness or some sort OCD obsession with special numbers.

EDIT: Well, to be fair, the formula would need to be multiplied by the original chance of success in order to prevent people from taking longshots all the time -- that way, the optimal point for gaining experience is a 50% chance of success. Which makes sense -- you learn a lot from near-misses, not much when you had no idea what you were doing to begin with.

The whole system needs to be reworked. There's a lot of magic skills that only have the useful spells at higher levels, making it nearly impossible to level them without exploiting the system. I would be in favor of going back to a more traditional experience system. I wouldn't limit it to killing enemies for experience but I think the player needs more of a say in which skills are being increased outside of using them.

But you don't become a master for doing wax on, wax off. Only karate kid does that
I agree with perilisk that learning by failures might be the way to go. But have really cool fumbles

The magnitude or casting cost of a spell had no effect on the amount of experience you gained for casting it, in either MW or OB. The same held true for combat, stealth skills, or anything else in the games. I think that you should be able to gain experience by doing easy tasks, but it should be less than by doing difficult tasks. In fact, it should be slightly more beneficial to do a single task with a high difficulty (especially if they reintroduce some degree of failure) than to do several easy tasks with the same total casting or fatigue cost.

I'd like to see experience gain tied to the effort expended (magicka cost, fatigue drain, or financial cost), and be further modified by the difference in the difficulty versus your skill level. Doing a difficult task that leaves you drained and weak should provide far more educational benefit than something easy that you can "spam" repeatedly with no consequence. That would make jumping around the map relatively useless, while making a few longer and more difficult jumps far more effective for self-training. Of course, you'd have to rest after those jumps, before you could try it again.

The game shouldn't necessarily work at trying to eliminate all exploits and loopholes, but should make them either a bit less effective or less desirable, while retaining some way for you to "work at" getting an advantage if you really want to put the time and effort into it. Placing the Mudcrab Merchant where he was strikes me as a good example: it was there for anyone who wished to exploit it, but so far off the normal path that you practically had to go there with the intent to find him. Putting a "soft cap" on potion and spell "buffs", so they become progressively less effective above something like 120 would "reign in" the blatant abuses (Attribute boosted to 7583 for 6,284,392 seconds), without making the system bland and lifeless.

Thrashing some lumbering, slow-moving hulk that relies on sheer HP totals to survive might test your endurance, but it doesn't test your skill much more than beating on a practice dummy for an hour. A lightly armored duelist, on the other hand, might go down in one hit, but actually landing that hit would require expertise in swordsmanship. It makes sense to get a lot XP in the latter case, not so much in the former.

Really, if it was up to me, I would make combat maneuvers work more like spells in Morrowind (that is, a chance that you screw it up and flail about ineffectively, trip over yourself while feinting, whatever. Also, potentially far more than 4 or 5 total for each skill). Advanced combat maneuvers would be necessary for surviving harder melee fights, but would come with risks that plain jane attack attack attack would not. Skill advancement would be driven by learning from failure.

They were easy to exploit your way up. But actually leveling them honestly was a pain in the ass. I'd have to heal myself from near death to full health dozens of times with a legitimate heal spell before I got a single skill point. Sure if I exploit it and have a 3pt heal or something, I'll get a skill point every health bar and for less mana than I naturally regen.

They need to clean up the exploits but also maybe improve leveling in general so you don't feel like you almost need to cheat in order to see the higher levels of skill. Like assuming I am not cheating the skill keeping a light spell going for an entire dungeon and not getting a skill point kind of svcks, especially since light is probably my only option at lower levels. As much as exploiting the system is lame, running around hitting 4,5,6,7,8 and waiting for the spells to end to hit that again every where I run so my skills actually level at more than a snails pace isn't a great option either. Your alteration skill should level at a reasonable rate at lower levels if you just throw up a shield spell for the fight, and not spam it every where you go.