To introduce myself, I used to be on the Neoseekers forums for MW (which are the most off topic forums I've seen), and I'm one of those old veterans who've wasted 1000 hours of their life on the game. So hello forums!
*Back to the topic

I am curious to see how the majority of players are. I abuse everything there is. I abused the awareness distance in bloodmoon to get to Thirks at level 3 (and get shadowsting, the special arrows, and the 2 gloves). Using the trade-sellback method and telekinis stealing I maxed out agility, strength, and speed at level 24 with training. Using the atronoch birth sign and arrows, I was able to get the Fang of Hgtenkth (I also levitated v the guy with the golden mask which made him run away) at level 10. You get my point. Be honest!

EDIT:

For the record, the soul trap glitch is really an exploit

Welcome to the forums. Have a http://img294.imageshack.us/img294/8246/fishystick.jpg. (kind of a tradition here)

When I started playing vanilla Morrowind, I used pretty much any loophole/abuse I could discover. That is, until I spoiled all my fun and lost any motivation to play the game. Then I decided to stop using all those tricks I discovered and even eliminate most of them through modding. Several months later, the Creeper/Mudcrab merchant don't exist anymore, brewing intelligence potions is now a thing of the past (replaced by other effects) and I use training and levitation with moderation, etc etc. Overall, I can say I'm having a lot more fun than before and I'll never go back to my old ways.

i use the soultrap glitch sometimes, but oher than that, i never really exploit the loopholes

usually, i dont have to/dont want to.

but i'm not above brewing up a few fort int potions to give a reasonable success rate when enchanting, or to brew up decent restore fatigue/health/magicka potions.

i'll admit, i abuse NPCs not being able to accuratly target a laterally moving player with a spell quite often, though.

I guess 110% purist is the option for me. I don't even use the ingame trainers :mellow:

That's not really purist though, is it? They're there for a reason - to sap all your money that you get from the random loot higher up in the game and reduce the time taken to level the skills you don't use much but really want higher... Or athletics...


I do try and stay away from using more than 1/2 per level, but they are there for a reason. Crazy even purer than pure, purists

I just used that as an example because it was mentioned on the poll. I don't use trainers, because I like going and actually using the skills to advance them. Plus using trainers can allow a pure mage to become top rank of the fighter's guild or some such, which shouldn't logically happen. *A few skills naturally rise far too slowly over time, and I have modded them (example: armorer).

The exception is armor; seriously, the system is NOT intelligent. At all. "Oh, I'm just going to sit here and let this monster cause me pain for a few hours, so I can get better at using my armor." *Grumble grumble*

Anyhow, I guess I'll put "better" examples: I don't use alchemy past normal-strength health/magicka potions, foreknowledge of high-end loot, soultrap glitch (seen it posted, never tried). You get the point.

I don't use trainers either. I also don't abuse alchemy to make instant-god potions, or extremely expensive ones, and I don't use the soultrap glitch. I sometimes levitate away from melee characters if the fight is really tough but usually not.

I also don't seek out artifacts or other easy to get expensive equipment on purpose, when I'm not supposed to be able to know where they are.

But I do jump all over the place.

I also never use the mudcrab merchant or Creeper.

Same. When I began the game I always got and sold it to creeper if I didn't need it. I never abused on making pots worth of 10k and sell them to mudcrab, but the other things would get me pretty rich on lvl 1 :foodndrink:

Now I have a mod to disable creeper and mudcrab barter, make self-made pots worthless, make training and traveling 10x more expensive. Still, I stole all the adamantinium armor from balmora's armorer and I already got the best armor on lvl 4. I wish there were mods to make all these items disappear from the crates :banghead:

I don't abuse any of these loopholes either, or at least not knowingly. I mean, there are a lot of things in this game that one person might consider a loophole and another might not. I have no qualms about using trainers; they're there for a reason, and sometimes certain skills need a boost. I think they're sufficiently expensive to deter overuse, at least in the early parts of the game (even when you start making quite a lot of money, trainers can really drain it very quickly), and later on when you've got so damn much money that you don't even care anymore, it doesn't really matter one way or the other.

As for Fortify Intelligence being used to Enchant or make potions... well, I've done that before, but I try not to use it as a money-making method, and it's not a common thing that I do.

I've never even found the Mudcrab Merchant, to be honest, and I've never really looked for him either. As for other merchants, well, I use mods that give them an actual decent amount of money so that I can actually sell things to them. It's not like they all walk around with 20000 gold as a result of the mod, so it's hardly game-breaking (most still have a couple thousand at most, but it sure beats 600).

I do love using Frenzy spells to kill people, though. On the one hand it seems like an exploit, but on the other, why would they include it other than to use it?

I tend to "limit" a lot of the exploits, rather than outright avoiding them. A few I simply will not do, because they spoil the game, in my opinion.

Mudcrab and Creeper are generally unknown to my characters until fairly high level, when the money really doesn't matter anymore and I just want to dump off some of the growing pile of fancy glass or Daedric junk, without having to "throw it away" (which would be even MORE absurd). At low level, when I'm struggling, it's far more entertaining for your character NOT to know about them. At level 20+, when you've got 6 Daedric Shields cluttering up the floor, Creeper and Mudcrab suddenly become "reasonable" additions to the game.

Potion brewing is easily exploitable, so I never sell potions to "permanent" vendors. Occasionally, I'll "unload" a potion on an unsuspecting travelling MCA or other "random" trader, but even that's limited to maybe a half-dozen over the course of the whole game. While I'll occasionally use a "vanilla" enchanted item and/or a single "vanilla" potion to boost the capacity to make better potions or enchantments, using home-made ones for the purpose is "verboten". The game itself suggests certain "exploits", so they're "fair and rational" in moderation, although taking them to their extremes is beyond the limits of what the in-game "experts" are capable of, so why should my novice character be able to pull it off?

Training in minor skills if fine, but I try to limit that to no more than one per level. Training in Major skills is not a good idea, in my opinion, and I tend to avoid Minor training for the same reasons, with a few exceptions.

I as a player know where to find the rare goodies, but my character wouldn't. If I get an in-game hint about them, they're fair game, otherwise I avoid them. A few, such as the BOBS, or others which you can legitimately run across at low level while adventuring, I tend to have the character "underuse" them, if they even take the trouble to acquire them, or in this specific case, have issues with the "other side" of the enchantment and consider them "cursed", at least until they reach sufficient level and skill to where they should be able to negate the problem. Other examples, like where to find a particularly good and expensive short sword sticking in the ground, or who to taunt and kill for a set of glass armor, are not something the character would know, and I simply ignore the possibility.

I occasionally stack potions (not to a ridiculous amount though, except on occasion with a pure alchemist), and I used to do the buy/sell ad infinitum trick with Creeper in order to sell very expense items to their full value.

Now I just mod a few merchants to have about 100k gold all the time, as it's tiresome, and I figure I earned the item I'm selling.

I use all of the tricks mentioned, but I dont really see them as tricks.

I think it makes sense for a good wizard and alchemist to realise he can make powerful potions by fortifying his intelligence, theres even an in game book about it.

And after all, Im not just anyone, Im the Nerevarine. It makes perfect sense to me that Im a powerful warrior and spellcaster, and that I perform feats others are incapable of.

I also get a lot of useful artifacts at lvl 1 such as the helm of oreyn bearclaw. I always roleplay I have visions, so for me there is no 'shouldnt know where they are'. I saw that in a dream, just like Azura spoke to me on the boat to Seyda Neen.

I guess its all about what makes you enjoy the game most, and for me one of the best things of Morrowind is that I have the ability to play like that. That the game mechanics are there for me, instead of me following a pre-set path.

Okay, okay, I jumped and took Stendarr's Hammer from the museum -- their only relic -- and recalled to my safe place to deposit it. How could I! I might also levitate every now and then to own the enemies without anything that's ranged. I don't even consider that abusing the game mechanics, though. Or, at least not fully. It would be nice if ordinary folk with levitation spells could levitate, although it would be a big problem for AI I guess...

What else? More often than not I'm jumping a lot. No use of Mudcrab Merchant (he's so far away from civilization... :ermm: ), but Creeper, yes. He might just be permanently hexed to do what he's doing as scamps, after all, are semi intelligent. Apparently some mages somewhere didn't like scamps and cursed the poor Creeper. I'm constantly questioning myself whenever I'm selling anything to him, but then I think of the money and forget to reason...

I might not think every flaw in the game mechanics as glitches though. It depends. Thus I took the liberty of using only one or two loopholes! B)

That was always my dilemma with the Mudcrab Merchant - he's just blantantly in the middle of [censored] nowhere, but I understand why he would have been made that way.

But since the time I first bought vanilla Morrowind, I've been a Xbox player; therefore, I didn't even know about 90% of the glitches in the game. Hell, I only stumbled upon this place in 2009, long after Morrowind was a 'regular' game for me. I have a copy of Morrowind and the expansions for computer, but I mainly use that for modding and testing purposes more than anything else. I just got way too used to doing things via Xbox, it's way more relaxing.

So obviously, I'd say I fall into the 110% purist category, simply because I never had access to most exploits.

I don't even use enchantments to boost my magic when I play.

I gerenally don't exploit the game too much, but one thing I do with almost all my characters is run into a Daedric ruin with a ton of health potions, just barely defeat a Daedra, sell its weapon for a ton of gold, and then use said gold at a trainer so I can level up artificailly fast. I know it's cheap but it's just so hard to resist.

guess I abuse a little.
buffing my intelligence to around 100-150 initially to boost my potions,use wisdom and a few fort,int-potions for it,later I don′t feel the need for it.
I make a lot of potions to sell and train intelligence,like to have int rising from early on,and as a moneycow of a moderate sort,using journeyman equipment.

admit I can take early trips to nice gear,dunno if that qualifies as abuse, I just happen to know a bit about mw.
And I usually enchant my gear with CE feather or strenght,and some various resistances depending on my chars race,vampire or not,etc to fit all that.
I see that more as a reward for players who are able to get that,rather than abuse though.

I find the game to be more enjoyable when I play realistically. No matter how much I want to sell things to a certain crustacean merchant for full price, I try to make myself feel like i'm living as this character. Abusing spells and enchantments are something that my character would not do, so I try to obey those parameters very strictly

The character I'm playing now presents a quandary that fits right in with this topic.

He's a Breton bard—the standard predefined class, not some "super-bard" with +10 to Luck and Endurance and strategically rearranged majors and minors—who signed on with the Imperial Legion up in Gnisis because it sounded like the best story to tell out of all his options. Problem is, he's not built for the hack-and-slash work of following General Darius' orders. (Yet.)

What he is, though, is a decent hand at Alchemy and Mercantile. It fits his backstory as the brains behind a small-time City skooma lab (which landed him in the Imperial prison from whence the PC cometh) and the pre-set skills for his class.

The straight-forward way for him to handle his business, then, would be to find a source for Restore Health and Restore Fatigue ingredients and cook himself up some help for combat situations. If there's a little extra left over—or if he should have the spare time to make a few on the side—why not sell them for a profit? After all, training isn't cheap.

But even though it makes perfect sense for his character, and even though not everyone's built to jump sword-first into dungeons from the get-go, there's a part of me that still associates this method of leveling the playing field with the Fortify Intelligence exploit shenanigans. He won't be waiting for 24 hours next to any merchant; he won't even be using the resell trick to bulk up anyone's stock of an ingredient. Still, it feels a bit cheap.

Then again, maybe that's just a veteran of many axe-wielding Nord characters talking. Would you do it? (Do you do it?)

I don't normally abuse any special glitches when I play or cheats. However there are two things I do for convienance: move Muddy (mudcrab merchant) to my house in Balmora; I console myself more grand soul gems as I usually like to collect the souls of all the named dagoths. Once or twice in the past I have given vendors a ton of gold just so I could get the cash from all the daedric armor and weapons. I don't do that anymore as it realized I got enough money from other stuff with out having to give them a larger bank. Never did the potion stacking or went out of my way to get certain items at low level.

Edit: I also go directly for the loot in the tree trunks in Seyda Neen by the lighthouse and just NW of the town on the way to the falling from the sky guy. I do use training to get my magical skills up enough so that I have a decent chance at being successful with restoration spells and recall.

Not sure I would consider the trade/sell back an abuse. And training is in the game so it's not really an abuse either (you have to learn how to do it from someone). And one other abuse I tend to do it against the guy in a daedric ruin way up north who is in full ebony armor---I jump or levitate to a pillar and just snipe him down.

Yeah. Which makes me wonder... How could it have been found in the first place? Someone must've found it via Construction Set or Beth must've given it away. It's not like someone tries to talk to every mudcrab of the game... is it? :S

One more abuse that came to my mind is that whenever I hear an interesting topic, I might UESPWiki that out. Where's all the fun in that, I ask myself. I found out about the Twin Lamps from the wiki for example. :/

Now for a real confession. I played MW for years, and have now come back to it after being bored by Oblivion.

I've never understood potions, nor how to make them. *blush* So I fight my way through the game. Selling and bartering is too much like hard work as far as I am concerned, so I don't use that glitch.

I do jump everywhere I go. And the one place I do abuse the game regularly is by finding the 'lost mine' early in the game and getting a really good weapon from Orvis Dren (? I think ?) in Vivec early in the game. But all of the other exploits I have read about take (what seem to me to be) and extraordinary amount of work ...

I first heard about it in the guidebook, as of course I didn't have the computer version and didn't hang around here. And even after hearing about it in the guidebook, I didn't actually find him until at least a year later, as I didn't know that his name was simply "Mudcrab" just like the other thousand in the world.

Alchemy is my characters' weakness followed by mercantilism. I enjoy playing as a Breton, many times born under the Autronach sign. Sometimes, he is a frustrated warrior type. Once or twice has been called to join the Imperial Cult. How I abuse it is to find merchants who restock ingredients.

When I arrive in Seyda Neen, I go around picking plants and culling wildlife (if it doesn't get me first), taste them to see what they do, make a note of the effect and sell the stuff to build up cash. Sometimes, my character gets really annoyed with a merchant who refuses to pay a reasonable price for a bulk sale and then sells them to him one at a time to make my point. It may take some time for the merchant to learn . Anyway, I look for merchants who restock those ingredients that had good effects and in game explain to the merchant that I want to develop a long term deal to buy stuff in bulk but he/she needs to increase the quantity they keep on hand. Once I do that, I gradually acquire alchemy eqpt and ASAP build up that skill.

When I first started playing MW, I used to take all the potions I made and sell them to any and all, but now I restrict myself to making potions that I can use without ill effect and I do not sell them as a means to make money in the game; between gathering and selling plants etc., money is tight at the start but there's always enough to equip and supply my character gradually. If I find that I overstocked when I was making potions and can't consume them fast enough before time to make a new batch, I just get rid of the old batch by stuffing them in whatever critter I've killed (yes - OCC, those bodies disappear after a time and whatever is in them gets removed from the game AFAIUI). By the middle of the game, my character is pretty much focused on restore health, restore fatigue, etc. I do abuse the fort. int and fort. luck potions to create really long lasting levitate, health and fatigue potions. Like others' comments, there's a point at which making it very powerful makes the game dull. I usually try to get my health and fatigue potions to be on a par with the "exclusive" potions. That is a work in progress, however

John