Imagine that hair pulling scenario.

"Time to make a gun..."

...

"I need a thing. I do not have the thing. How do I not have the thing. Where can I get the thing. DOGMEAT! PIPER! WE HAVE TO GET THE THING!"

And the quest for the toy car began, because we needed the thing from the thing, to make the thing.

Fairness to the integrity of the game and the creative work of the developer. If you have an exploit that fundamentally breaks the progression of the game, that is debasing the experience of the game and undermining the time and effort that went into building it.

Whether this is a single player experience or a multiplayer experience is irrelevant. It's how the game is functioning that matters, and exploits that adversely affect the experience of the game can inevitably cause harm to the experience in unintended ways.

BGS wants you to play the game the way you want, to a point. If what you are doing completely breaks that experience in ways that were not intended, that's something they would try and discourage. Every game has boundaries and we are intended to play within the borders of that sandbox. When we start recreating the sandbox to the detriment of it, that can hurt the reputation and even perception of the game to the general public.

Poppycock and rubbish.

I doubt the devs honestly care so long as, oh they're having fun with it. Jolly good then, back to the workshop.

Fallout is not a holy relic or text that needs it's integrity preserved.

Again, if the developers did not care, why bother fixing any of the exploits in their games with patches? They fix all of them for a reason, whether its to preserve the integrity of the game or something else. This is their art they are giving to the international community. How that art is used and perceived matters a lot to them.

Sadly there are always going to be exploits. Like standing on a rock out of range of two mudcrabs and grinding your Conjuration skill by showing them again and again and again how to summon a bound sword...as long as you are near an aggro'd enemy, you gain the XP to the skill.

But exploits are part of the fun. If that's your idea of fun. Some gamers enjoy finding that one little loop in the system.

Or...the joys of making it rain watermelons all over the Imperial City with a single arrow.

Suppose someone wants to build a character that is a gun merchant and he spends his time scavenging and modding weapons for resale. That person earns Xp for modding his weapons, he then sells them to merchants and uses the XP gained to unlock more mods and better barter perks. He gets to do as he wishes, which to you might be grinding, and his game has absolutely ZERO effect on your game and how you play. What you call an exploit, he calls his game.

Make the weapon you want as many times as you want, I don't care because your game world and mine will never meet.

I like that we get XP for crafting, and I'm cool with it even if we get XP for crafting the same stuff over & over again. Like LostPony said, a person could be playing a weapon merchant type (which I'm kind of banking on doing, myself).

Where it gets tricky is how much XP you get, how easily you can find parts & put together mods, how much it all weighs, how many caps you get for each weapon, how high Gun Nut/Science needs to be to make stuff worth the hassle, etc. Simply put, we don't know all the variables enough to know whether it's something people can use to grind effectively, if it can be exploited, or if going around killing molerats & radscorpions is a better investment XP-wise. There's just no telling until the game's out.

Bah. Correlate the crafted item's value to the XP earned. Balance the rarity. And balance the payoff with other means of gaining XP. This isn't Bethesda's first rodeo; they patched iron daggers in Skyrim, so they already figured out that was broken.

The only that "broke" Skyrim in my experience was if you levelled just through crafting a bunch you lacked combat skills once you got back to adventuring. So if you came across an enemy that scaled to your level you were kind of screwed (because if I'm level 20 facing level 20 enemies but I have the offensive skills of a level 5 character its going to cause an imbalance.)

Not too worried about this since Fallout has a different leveling system. Like has said, tie XP gain to difficulty and rarity with diminishing returns and problem solved. If I can think that up in five minutes then I'm hardly worried about a bunch of professionals who have encountered that issue before being able to solve it.

If it happens that way but no one ever talks about it, did it ever even happen? lol

Single player game so I don't really care what other players do. I know BGS didn't make it so that you're accidently leveling a ton from weapon and mod crafting. You have to intentionally try and do that, so as far as I'm concerned it doesn't even exist since I won't be doing it

so much this ...I'll never understand why so many people are worried about how someone else will play a game...don't wanna use a exploit..then don't...it's your world play however you want or don't want...but don't cry about bethesda letting you do what you want to do...love you all hugs bugs and thugs