Is it realistic to put 8 gold coins and a clothing iron under a heavily locked chest?

Because the only other option is to have a level requirement on either the Daedra quests or their rewards. If doing Meridia's quest will always give you a lv50 godlike artifact sword, then you damn well shouldn't be able to get (or use) it before level 50.


Personally, I never had a problem with the scaled rewards in Oblivion. Do a level 15 quest, get a lv15 reward. :shrug:

Again, this is a problem with the crafting/upgrading implementation in the game, not the leveled loot. I got a Mace of Molag Bal in my teens, and it's still better in raw stats than base ebony, plus it has three enchants. Without the crafting, the named loot is awesome.

No, this whole issue is that crafting is both too easy and way too powerful.

I apologize for resuscitating my own thread, but I can answer this easily...
Don't be mystified. This isn't about optimal game design, it's about the people who are calling the shots regarding game design. Its about the bosses who are running the show. You sound confused as to why the game is the way it is. Personally, I believe that I see it clearly. What we have here is an arbitrary power that bases design decisions on *what worked in the past*. Since Oblivion sold many copies and "earned" high reviews, than therefore what Oblivion did was right and Skryim has to take the same concepts and refine them further. Sadly, this is what dictates the way sequels turn out. Bottom line is, there is a lot of confusion in the design team and they don't know what they're doing, so they stick with the "tried and true" method of what sold the most copies, while throwing innovation and *common sense* out the window.

I work for a corporation myself, and I know how the hive mind works. It is tragic and there are so many huge flaws that go ignored, but it's only because people need to get paid and are afraid of getting fired, so they do everything *right* to appease the higher-ups. This is an epidemic that has severely damaged videogaming, and I think it's my duty to point this out. It's why videogaming is such a limited market and people see videogamers as losers, because we are, we are being sold an inferior product that is compromised by quantity over quality.

You damn well should be able to! And there are level requirements on daedric quests, which is horrible imo. The enemies during a quest shouldn't scale down, so there's still and adequate challenge to retrieve the artifact. But to deliberately keep the player from content because he isn't high enough level is total nonsense in an open world game.


Without enchanting/alchemy exploits, smithing isn't that great any more in higher levels. That's because, as far as I can tell, upgrades give flat bonuses to your weapons. A legendary steel dagger with smithing 100 goes from 15 damage to 45, a glass dagger from 27 to 57, etc. It's just a flat 30 bonus. That makes high smithing incredibly powerful in low levels. Just look at the steel dagger! It increases the damage by 200%! For higher level items, the bonus is much lower, which is totally the opposite you'd expect from character progression.
Basically, the upgrade bonus should be a percentage of the base damage of the weapon, and not a flat bonus. And it should not exceed 100%, so no matter what, you can't go overboard.

Well you can of course create your own unique items through smithing and enchanting and then just drop them in a town or fort or something. Wait a few days and then try to get them back ! If you do this a lot and spread a lot of enchanted and named weapons you will find them in dungeons or in houses even through pickpocketing. Make your own game !

This. In this style of game, if the player can manage something epic, all the power to him. Unfortunately, currently power leveling crafting is absurdly easy AND extremely profitable. One or the other is one thing, but both is a problem.



While I agree the feedback loop is the worst part, utterly breaking things, leveling smithing to 100 is so easy and that +30 damage is enormous. If you do that first thing in the game (easy to do, before you even leave Riverwood, though it's less of a hassle if you discover a couple towns first) then you're turning the random steel dagger you find into an ebony dagger. It's ridiculous. And that's without abusing the system.

Sure, because it's a flat rate it's not as bad at high levels, but it's still game breakingly bad. The massive gains to both armor rating and weapon damage combine to make melee so far superior to magic it's not even funny. With my non-exploity upgraded dragonbone and ebony axes (15 health absorbs and 15 stamina absorb) I effortlessly walk through content on expert, and I haven't enchanted my armor yet except my boots with muffle. That's at level 43.

My destruction magic is high, but useless in comparison, and my damage shouts are a joke. Just whirlwind into the middle of groups and lay about with dual wield power attacks.

There is a loot problem in Skyrim, but I do not think that too few unique items is one of them. I think the daedric lord rewards and the few unique artifacts are enough. Unique items should rightfully remain rare, that is what makes them special. Add in too many unique items, and they will lose their luster.

A problem with unique items is that they are locked to your level. If you get one at level 10, it would be very weak when you are level 40 and can even make better gear.

Speaking of making better gear, crafting is too easy, and too easily exploited. This diminishes the gear that you can find even further. By using exploits, you can craft overpowered gear for yourself that even dwarfs the legendary artifacts. Thus any loot that you find becomes meaningless.

There are many balances we can introduce.

We can remove exploits from crafting professions.
We can make them harder to level.
We can make it more expensive to craft daedric gear (maybe impossible and make ebony the highest gear you can craft, and daedric has to be found from deadly dungeons), make enchants cost money. It will be more expensive to enchant ebony gear than to enchant iron gear.
This way even if people power level crafting, they still cannot sport the best gear due to it being too expensive, and finding them may be cheaper.
We can make money harder to earn.
We can make unique gear level with you as you level, making them more precious.

Once quality loot becomes harder to get, people will then have more incentive to do dungeons to get them.

I'm 50 and I've only ever gotten one 'upgrade' piece of kit in the whole playthrough, a daedric bow.

I pretty much don't bother opening chests now, it's just a waste of my time.