The essential distinction to be made here is between
1. playing to break the game, and
2. Using game mechanics the way they are intended

Its not an exploit to level all the crafting skills to 100. If that breaks the game then its bad game design

:D

That is an unfair criticism. I posted this once before in another thread, but I think all of the people espousing the "It is your fault for trying to get the best stuff" viewpoint should really consider it.

Question: If the gameplay of TES centers around using the skills you choose in order to improve those same skills, and the very act of doing so makes the game way too easy, is the game playing the way Beth wants it to?

The essential distinction to be made here is between
1. playing to break the game, and
2. Using game mechanics the way they are intended

Say I am roleplaying a warrior who smiths. Is this feasible without breaking the game? Smithing is not a cheat in the game, it is a skill. As such, it is intended to be raised. It should therefore be feasible to specialize in. If I cannot specialize in smithing without ruining the game, the developers have not "given me the freedom to be overpowered", they have removed my freedom to play the game with challenge. Note the distinction between using mechanics as they are presented and intentionally trying to ruin these mechanics.
Example of intentionally breaking mechanics: finding a wall in Oblivion near a guard and sneaking while walking into the wall for hours to raise your sneak skill. This is clearly against the spirit of how the skill is supposed to be used. As such, the fault lies with the player. Why? Because if the player uses the skill normally, they will not become overpowered, and the skill will not raise too quickly. Both of these reasons are important if you take the time to contrast them with smithing.
Example of broken game mechanic: Playing a warrior who specializes in smithing. How should such a character play using the game mechanics? They should smith regularly. What is the result? They level smithing ridiculously fast and become overpowered. If using the game mechanic as such will result in breaking the game, then it is not the OPs fault for trying to level smithing.

The root of the problem: Games are designed to be challenging by nature. There is a reason that most skills will not make you overpowered simply through their normal use. This is the case because developers balance the rate of levelling and the power of that levelling such that you won't become too strong too quickly. I am not saying that you should not have the ability to become ridiculously strong, but rather that the natural course of the game should not make you overpowered. Should you want to become overpowered, you should have to consciously make that choice. I have no sympathy for people who used custom spells in Oblivion engineered to be ridiculously powerful, as they obviously knew what they were doing. If playing normally yields the same result, something is wrong.

I question the assumption in all of these posts that bettering your character makes you responsible for being overpowered. To those who accept that line of thought, I propose this hypothetical:

You like playing basketball and enjoy a challenge. You can either....
i) play against bad players shooting with your wrong hand (because it would be too easy using your proper hand)
or
ii) play against better players with your proper hand and exert yourself fully.

Which seems the better option? 2 is much more appealing because consciously gimping yourself should not be necessary. If I am roleplaying a smith in a dangerous world, would he consciously choose to gimp himself? Obviously not, so why am I required to gimp him as such? However, if my mage was told that he would have to smith 5000 more daggers in order to make that dagger twice as strong, he may not choose to invest the time. That is balancing at work. Note that in the basketball example, I may be given the possibility that if I specifically search for growth pills on the internet I can become ridiculously tall and eliminate the challenge of the game of basketball. However, this would require conscious effort on my part. I would like to see Skyrim take this approach, instead of asking me to consciously gimp myself while roleyplaying.

Hm, perhaps another way of explaining my problem:

What if Beth had put a single cave somewhere around where the player starts (or that a player is led near by an early quest in the game, something like that), and in this single cave is all of the best loot in the game. But the cave isn't called "ALL THE BEST LOOT Cave" or anything, it's just a cave. So you go in the cave and you stumble upon a sword laying around. You look at it and go "woah, this sword is way better than mine" So you take the sword. It's ridiculous imo at this point for the character to say to themselves "well, I don't know... this sword looks a bit too powerful if you ask me, maybe I should wait until I pick it up". It feels completely natural to pick up the sword. You go deeper into the cave and this repeats. You find armor a lot better than yours, and then a helm, etc, etc. You go through the cave and grab the stuff that's an improvement. The enemies in the cave weren't particularly tough or anything like that, standard stuff you'd expect to find in a cave at this point. Then you leave, and you think to yourself, "well that was a nice cave, I got a ton of nice loot." Then you go on with the game and you realize that all the loot everywhere else you go svcks. You have no incentive to really go in caves anymore because they don't offer much. In hindsight you realize that going into that cave was a bad idea. On your next character, when you come across the cave, you're probably not going to go inside, because you saw how it made the rest of the game not as fun. It doesn't change the fact that putting the cave there was a bad idea in the first place.

Say I am roleplaying a warrior who smiths. Is this feasible without breaking the game? Smithing is not a cheat in the game, it is a skill. As such, it is intended to be raised. It should therefore be feasible to specialize in. If I cannot specialize in smithing without ruining the game, the developers have not "given me the freedom to be overpowered", they have removed my freedom to play the game with challenge. Note the distinction between using mechanics as they are presented and intentionally trying to ruin these mechanics.
Example of intentionally breaking mechanics: finding a wall in Oblivion near a guard and sneaking while walking into the wall for hours to raise your sneak skill. This is clearly against the spirit of how the skill is supposed to be used. As such, the fault lies with the player. Why? Because if the player uses the skill normally, they will not become overpowered, and the skill will not raise too quickly. Both of these reasons are important if you take the time to contrast them with smithing.
Example of broken game mechanic: Playing a warrior who specializes in smithing. How should such a character play using the game mechanics? They should smith regularly. What is the result? They level smithing ridiculously fast and become overpowered. If using the game mechanic as such will result in breaking the game, then it is not the OPs fault for trying to level smithing.

re: leveling smithing makes looking for loot obsolete....


Personally, I don't think so. Without a high level of enchanting to go along with it, nothing you can Smith will be more useful than the enchanted things you can find. I leveled my Smithing up on my current character, and only ended up making less than half my gear. Couldn't replace the 50% frost resist shield, or the 50% fire resist boots, or the archery-bonus gloves. Also couldn't make better weapons. Now, I did use Smtihing to improve those items. But just having a decent level of Smithing didn't make dungeon-diving pointless.


Now, I'm talking about gear at equivalent levels - yes, if you power-level your Smithing so you have Glass/Daedric/Dragon when the rest of the world hasn't gotten beyond Steel, then it'll be better than the enchanted loot you can find. Me, I leveled Smithing as I went - I only hit 100 Smithing in the 40's. I started making Elven and Glass gear a few levels after I'd started finding it in chests, not 10+ levels earlier.

But even at level 50+, without high-powered Enchanting skill, I still can't make better gear than I can find. Smithing lets me make the stuff I do find better, and lets me fill in the slots that I haven't found good stuff for.

It's based on choice you do not have to use the best weapons. I have somebody that uses forsworn gear.

I think all of this could have been solved or resolved by role-playing.

If you establish a character and let that dictate your actions these things won't happen to you.

Think of role-playing like...a movie. If you were directing a Superman movie and your starring actor was asking if he could use a gun, what would you say?

You should say, 'Superman DOES NOT use guns.'

It's the same for your PC. There may be self imposed limitations, or not, it all depends on the character. I think you should ask yourself why you wanted daedric armor so fast in the first place. It's not like you couldn't beat anything wearing iron or steel.

I raised my smithing to 100 also but I only use Elven weapons and wear iron armor w/scaled bracer & boots. I never picked the perks to make daedric or dragon armor because my character would NEVER wear them.

Since I'm RP'ing and my PC isn't trying to be a blacksmith forever...

-the way I RP is that I decide what 'profession' my PC will have and try to only make gold doing that. If I was a blacksmith I'd only make/sell/loot weapons and armor for gold the same for being an alchemist or dealer in magical tomes, scrolls, etc.

...I only raised my skill in order to improve my personal gear. The guy in Riverwood is looking for 'help around his forge' so I just kept going back and making/selling daggers to him. RP'ing like I'm a blacksmith's assistant.

Having served as a blacksmith's assistant I'm now going to start doing what I (my PC) always wanted which is to be an alchemist. I'll no longer deal in any weapons or armor and will now concentrate on ingredients and potions.

Eventhough my other skills (weapons/armor/archery) aren't where they need to be, or where I'd like them, I know my gear is the best, for its' type, and my skills can catch up.

As the Thane of Whiterun, I won't become the Thane of any other hold, it's my duty to hunt bandits in the hold. I use that as a cover/reason for exploring instead of just roaming around and clearing places.

I'm eventually going to join the Legion and then go around to the Imperial friendly holds and hunt their bandits. Basically another cover/reason to explore. That's when I'll take on other side quests RP'ing as an Imperial officer bringing order to the territory. If I expand my duties and RP as an Imperial Special Agent assigned to Skyrim I could use that as the cover/reason for joining the other factions, in order to discover whether they pose a threat to the Empire or not...the real reason is because I have to be a member of certain guilds to complete some quests (I want these items out of my inventory...lol).

The whole time collecting potions/ingredients to sell to the alchemists of Skyrim.

I think the experience is diminished when you play the game with no...direction? If you're just on a mission to get the best of something once you get it then what?

Create a character/story/role that always has a reason to interact with the game and, IMO, you'll have a better experience.

I just got my character to 100 smithing and am on my way to full daedric (was slightly upset that dragon plate appears to be worse than daedric?) Having done this and realizing that I have relatively little incentive (well, significantly reduced) to go dungeon crawling or just do quests hoping for loot, I see that getting to 100 smithing is probably a bad idea, and I probably won't do it on my next character (planning for an elitist, murderous she-nord who thinks something like working a forge is beneath her).

But to people who just say "smithing's OP? don't use smithing". Well, yeah, ok, I see that now. But it wasn't my fault for doing it the first time -- I mean, as a character, my goal is to try and get the best gear that I can. It feels ridiculous going to great lengths to try and come upon good weapons/gear when you know it's so much easier to just make it yourself. So, yes, much like fast travel in Oblivion, having seen that it somewhat spoils the game, I'm going to try avoiding it in the future (now that the damage is done on this character I'm probably going to go the whole 9 yards with enchantment, too). That's not to say that it isn't a mistake though, and that i'm not annoyed at beth for spending all this time making cool dungeons, etc, but apparently not spending a couple of minutes to think about the game mechanics and how they could potentially spoil the game.

Basically people have been brought up by World of Warcraft. MMO games where if there's an exploit, its the developers fault, and the kids abusing it are considered savy and ahead of the curve. Goes both for obvious exploits, and FotM builds that has an edge of some sort.

They take this approach into a singleplayer game, and abit dumb realise they just cheated themselves instead of others.

So when a guy says on forums; I crafted a dragon armor and pay 0 magicka for destruction. He is trying to provoke a response of whining from you. Whining that will be turned towards the developers (mom and dad replacements), hopefully making them alter the mechanics. He is having a much harder time than in MMOs of course, since you can basically care less about what he does. He will mention this, but use it as a taunt hoping you will bite.

It's all business as usual on the backseats of the car.

I just got my character to 100 smithing and am on my way to full daedric (was slightly upset that dragon plate appears to be worse than daedric?) Having done this and realizing that I have relatively little incentive (well, significantly reduced) to go dungeon crawling or just do quests hoping for loot, I see that getting to 100 smithing is probably a bad idea, and I probably won't do it on my next character (planning for an elitist, murderous she-nord who thinks something like working a forge is beneath her).

But to people who just say "smithing's OP? don't use smithing". Well, yeah, ok, I see that now. But it wasn't my fault for doing it the first time -- I mean, as a character, my goal is to try and get the best gear that I can. It feels ridiculous going to great lengths to try and come upon good weapons/gear when you know it's so much easier to just make it yourself. So, yes, much like fast travel in Oblivion, having seen that it somewhat spoils the game, I'm going to try avoiding it in the future (now that the damage is done on this character I'm probably going to go the whole 9 yards with enchantment, too). That's not to say that it isn't a mistake though, and that i'm not annoyed at beth for spending all this time making cool dungeons, etc, but apparently not spending a couple of minutes to think about the game mechanics and how they could potentially spoil the game.

I think smithing should level by type, so you get to, say, 10 by doing iron daggers, but subsequent daggers don't improve the score--only steel does. And so on like that.

Not your fault, but you shouldn't be whining about it as you went and used it - it's like the people who whine about fast travel being in the game because they don't have the self-control to not use it.

I think smithing should level by type, so you get to, say, 10 by doing iron daggers, but subsequent daggers don't improve the score--only steel does. And so on like that.

I'm not a fighter by nature. I don't like long battles, and I don't want to die. So yes, I want the best stuff so I don't have to worry about being killed while picking flowers.