The only thing I can agree with is that crafting skills are way too easy to level. I want skills that take 50+ hours to max out. Smithing can currently be gotten to 100 in 1-2 hours. Not enough effort for such a huge reward.

Alchemy is slightly better in this aspect. It takes FOREVERRRR to get to 100, but when you finally get that 100, you feel much more accomplished than you did with smithing. Alchemy is still too easy to get to 100 though. If the wait feature didn't exist, it may be better.

Well, clearly they are related to skill use they're just not, as I said, in a 1:1 relationship. You can't get any perks for a skill if you don't use it, so there's your relationship. That doesn't mean that the relationship is as good as it can be, of course, and if the discrepancy is too great, it's a problem. I'm happy to agree with you on this. And I agree that it is illogical to train a different skill and use that experience to acquire a perk in the first skill. But I don't think that's what the developers were really going for.

I think the problem is that taking a min/maxing approach to character builds ends up inverting the relationship that player's take toward progression. If you, logically, assume that 100 in a skill = the best you can be and therefore a master of every perk available in that tree and then realize that you can't get every perk by reaching 100 in that skill because the xp allocations don't allow it, it doesn't make sense and it looks like a design flaw. But, realistically, you're not going to reach 100 in a skill in isolation. You're not swinging a sword in a vacuum. You're acquiring experience in a variety of other skills simultaneously and that other experience allows you to invest in perks. If you play the way they expect you to, and the way the game has been designed, you can achieve all of the perks in a skill tree by the time you reach 100 because you've borrowed xp from other skill trees to do it. You've invested your extra 'energy' in mastering one skill over another. In other words: they've rewarded your choice to specialize. This goes back to what I said about perks being like special tricks you can learn, but don't have to. You can spend thousands of hours on the firing range improving your aim, but that doesn't mean you're learning how to quick draw or trick shoot. Those are separate skills that someone with less experience on the range could master before you.

The 'broken' relationship between xp gains for leveling a skill and the leveling requirements for mastering all of the perks is probably not accidental. They might not have been aware of the illogical consequences of breaking out a spreadsheet and min/maxing the numbers (though they might have been) but their design focus was aimed at a different goal than yours: they wanted a system that forced players to create different builds so that not every character would be an everyman, master of all perks by the end of the game. That was a complaint against Oblivion's design that they hoped their new design would correct. People playing Oblivion complained about the very thing you're saying they broke in Skyrim. Who's right? The people who didn't like that they could max out every skill, thus eliminating the class mechanic altogether? Or the people who like to be able to master every single skill? If all it takes to get every single perk in a tree is to use only the experience gained from that skill, then every player can max every skill and acquire every perk. You might not like that design, and it certainly breaks down logically if you take a skill in isolation, but I think it's just a side-effect of their design objective (forcing different character builds without restricting player choice to class selections) and if they were even aware of it, they probably didn't consider it worth worrying about. I think the design is very clever, personally, though I don't think it's perfect. (For example, you should never be forced to use a skill, like Speech, just by selling stuff.)

The problem is, which you point out quite clearly, is that, unless you specialize early on, you end up being forced to train other skills to keep acquiring perks in a skill you have maxed. You haven't acquired all of the perks because you've been spending perks here and there as you play instead of dumping all of them into a single skill tree. This is a legitimate complaint, because you are expected to spread your perks around a bit, so their design forces you to specialize without choosing a class, but breaks down at higher levels. The design prohibits you from creating a character that is both a Jack-of-all-trades and a Master-of-all-trades. Is there a way to force specialization on a player without creating this problem? Should they force players to specialize if they don't want to, or allow them to acquire every perk in the game? I believe, as I said, that they did it to address complaints that players made about Oblivion, but maybe they should have ignored those complaints and left it the way it was? You can't design a system that makes everyone happy because, by definition, everyone wants different things.

Yeah I do not abuse things like the smithing. Although once in awhile when my skill points are close to the next level. I will make a few things like chaep jewelry or iron daggers. Some players I noticed just maxed out smithing right from the start. Yeah you can have epic gear, but your combat skills are still crap then.

I don't think Beth is going to worry about it because everyone loves the game except for about 5 loud angry dorks.

See Beth, this is what happens when you try to maximize profits for the "casual" or "console" game crowd. You give them a gorgeous open ended world, which allows you to choose how you progress, and they'll whine, nitpick, and harass you as a company for every little thing THEY percieve as wrong. Come on people, TES has always been a reflection of real life set to a fantasy background. And just like in real life, some decisions will either gimp you for life (do nothing but smoke oxycontins), while others will give you an "unfair" advantage over others(becoming a pharmacologist and selling the oxycontin). The sense of entitlement of this next generation of gamers is utterly disgusting. Where are your fathers to teach you these things?

It is a well written article that offers some valid suggestions. Elder Scrolls games are combat centric. Probably because that is the easiest way to present challenges in such a large capacity. More content aimed at non-combat skills would round the product out. The responses have been, for the most part, also well thought out and have provided additional ideas. Overall, an enjoyable thread. I wish I had more to contribute. My primary character has been combat based, and I have barely touched enchanting, some my gameplay experience has not been impacted by these issues.

Wow, this is the most ridiculous, ass-backwards apologist BS I've read here so far. Congrats.

And I think the majority of people play the way you way. It would probably be a good idea for them to address this 'exploit' in future editions of the game, however. It's certainly doable, just a bit of an oversight.


Well, more like 50 (51 if you include me ). They'll still try to fix some of these issues, though, even if they only receive a few, vocal complaints about it. In spite of what you read in the forums, it is obvious that Skyrim attempts to resolve dozens of complaints that people had about Oblivion.


Please don't make the mistake of attributing complaints solely to a certain demographic of gamers. While I sympathize with your frustration, that is simple prejudice. I have exchanged posts with dozens (hundreds?) of people on these forums and the complaints seem to be pretty evenly divided and 'mature'. I find no noteworthy distinction between casual gamers and PC gamers, or between young and old gamers. Don't contribute to the 'crotchety old pc gamer' stereotype. You give people like me a bad name.


Your post was a wonderful contribution! It certainly brightens my day. Thank you for the kind words.


Ask yourself: does this make it better?

I was obviously using hyperbole to illustrate a point, that goes without saying.

And I do agree that there are some things the article does illustrate well, IE how lockpicking/pickpocketing/speech will gimp your character if those are your leveling focuses. There should be paths players who choose those playstyles to remain relevant. I just disagree with the outlook on smithing/enchanting/alchemy because it IS a player choice to powerlvl those for easy levels and some of the best loot in the game. And the suggestion to "cap" these skills is a horrible idea, because it IS an open-ended non-linear world.

Though we wouldn't have these problems if it weren't for the homogenization toward console gameplay. Earlier iterations of the series didn't have these perk and leveling problems, though their systems had flaws unto themselves. It's the nature of the beast, you can't please all of the people all of the time, and the broader the audience, the less likely you are to please the majority of them.

It's also a player choice to open the console and +1,000,000 gold but I don't think it should be an in-game option. The difference between crafting (Smithing/Enchantment/Alchemy, though Speech suffers from the same problem) and other skills is that the means of leveling consists of using the menu. This can hardly be considered a challenge in the same way that fighting or even picking locks is. I think that all skills should be roughly equally hard to level, and should provide roughly equivalent rewards (though not combat rewards). At the highest levels, Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy should provide the player with significant benefits; I just think players should be forced to earn them. The only reason why these skills are exploited is because they are too easy to level. And that's something that can be easily fixed.


Since this is obviously a subject of interest for you, let's take a brief aside and discuss this. My apologies for making an example out of you, since you are hardly alone in your views.



I think blaming everything on 'consolization' is a little simplistic. Yes, some features (UI) have been tailored to the console market. I think it's acceptable to accommodate 90% of your customers if you're a business. It's known as customer service. I play on pc and I haven't felt the change to be particularly burdensome. The UI is clunky. Not really a big deal since I spend 95% of the game not using the interface. Do I wish it was better? Sure, but it's not going to make me stop playing the game. This is a legitimate complaint, but nothing to be up in arms about.

Blaming the gameplay changes on demographics is a little trickier, though, since I think many elements which ES purists consider 'core RPG elements' that have been abandoned in Skyrim (classes, attributes) were not abandoned to 'dumb it down for console players'; I think they were removed because Bethesda wants the player to focus on the role-playing, not the number crunching. Looking at your stats is not role-playing, that's gaming. It's not bad, it's just not an essential feature of RP. You can RP without them. I'm a serious RPer and I don't miss them at all.

But many people like to watch their stats and feel that something is missing if they aren't there. That doesn't mean that they're better role-players, or a smarter, more sophisticated demographic. I don't have a handy list of numbers representing my RL Intelligence, Strength, etc., but I don't think my real life experience is any less convincing because of it. Stats are interface. Many very sophisticated RPers want to eliminate the interface altogether; they want to get rid of the compass, crosshair, map markers, etc., so that they can focus on the experience. They call all of these features 'hand-holding' and concessions to casual gamers. Many of these same people want the stats brought back, they want pages and pages of stats, journals, etc. I don't need any of these things to immerse myself in the experience (okay, maybe a better journal). Should I consider these people less or more sophisticated than myself?

The answer is that they are neither. They are not smarter or dumber or more or less in need of hand-holding. They just have preferences about how they like to play the game. I'm sure the doctors and lawyers that play Skyrim and use fast travel so that they can keep their schedules take umbrage at being accused of being less sophisticated gamers because they take advantage of the feature. Do they need more hand-holding than the 'hard-core RPGer' who works at McDonald's? Are casual gamers second-class gaming citizens because many of them don't have sixteen hours a day to play video games? Obviously these are stereotypes drawn from a stacked deck to illustrate my point. Which is that any generalization about a relationship between the way a person chooses to play the game, their intelligence and ability to imaginatively participate in the experience, and the platform that they play it on is based entirely on prejudice and speculation.

The whole argument about 'consolization' is so rife with poor logic and prejudice that it barely deserves consideration and yet it appears in almost every thread. If you attribute every gameplay change to this desire to appeal to a broader market instead of considering the inherent value of the mechanic itself, you are not really interested in understanding the mechanic and your arguments will suffer because of it. Is the compass a 'concession' or a tool that allows the developers to simulate the player's ability to tell direction in a world that lacks GPS? It would be very odd if the characters in Skyrim had trouble telling which way was North but equally odd if the player could. The compass bridges the gap between what the character should know, and what the player does know. To call it a concession to console gamers is just to misunderstand the purpose of the mechanic. Fast travel can be understood as the implementation of narrative elision in a non-linear environment. The convention is accepted in novels and films without question, yet on the forums it becomes a source of one-upmanship, as if it were somehow nobler to forsake using it. Using fast travel doesn't make you a 'bad' RPer, it merely states a preference about how you prefer to spend your time playing: walking through the wilderness or doing other things. Every single mechanic can be demonized as a concession to 'casuals' ('muggles?') or a useful tool depending on whether or not you happen to prefer it. Consequently, all arguments based on the supposition that it was implemented purely to appeal to a broader market is null and void of merit. It never hurts to take the time to understand what you are talking about before making sweeping generalizations about other players.



Do you totally hate me yet?


1. Yes. and 2. It certainly seems that way.

It's not just a "power-gamer" mentality that would have a problem with this, however.

In Morrowind and Oblivion, both, I enjoyed the fact that I could change out how I played the game dynamically. I started Oblivion, for example, with a sort of "Nightblade" build using bows and light armor and magic. It turned out I really couldn't use bows terribly well, however, so I switched to blades. Most of the time, at least. I still used it for long-bomb sniping, especially with poisons. I fought with a dagger and "drain" spells when it came time to melee, though.

What about perks, though? It punishes not-specializing. If I put perks into a skill, then decided I liked some other playstyle better, I can't get my perk points back. As someone mentioned before in another thread, it functionally forces the sort of stereotyped uses of the skills and archetypes while the lines are generally much more blurred in the non-Arena games. A perk I have spent on archery is a perk I'm never getting back.

More, perks are devastatingly effective one-shot boosts to the power of skills. It heavily rewards pumping up one skill you use all the time by the fact that any skill that doesn't have the benefit of perks is massively underpowered by comparison. (Consider the difference between destruction with and without perks - you have spells that cost over twice as much, deal 2/3s as much damage, and lack the stunlock component or the instant disintegration. There's just no way to rely on destruction without the perks.)

Sure, some people have tried to come up with alternate solutions - that we could un-allocate perks or else gain extra perks through killing extra dragon souls, but this goes beyond the point. I actually rather dislike the whole notion that we even have to plan our growth out at all. (This gets us into the whole debate about "power-gaming" in the first place - the perks CREATE power-gaming by the fact that you have to plan your growth and have obvious better-and-worse perks to choose. Or at least, it creates a new way to power-game, there certainly were ways before.)


As one of those things I want to do when I get the CK, I want to actually break this perk progression off from levels, and make it based upon an additional set of sub-skill experience. Rather than having lump-sum purchases with perks, you simply focus your "experience" gain with a skill towards gaining some particular within-the-skill specialization.

This can be done either through manual selection (which may be necessary, but not preferable), such as just picking a line of perks you want to learn first from the skills screen, and as you gain skill experience, you naturally start unlocking those perks. Better, this could go without the lump-sum nonsense of suddenly having your armor protect you 20% more than it did just a second ago right in the middle of combat. You could simply have that modifier have much more subtle gradients of .1% bonus defense each time you get to a minor milestone. Because we aren't using one single pool of perk points, we have no need to try to make all perks cost the same and be balanced entirely to one another.

The alternative, which would be better for immersion, but may not necessarily be possible in many cases, would be a natural extension of growth-through-use - just make your perks come from the manner in which you use your skill. You get the fire damage bonuses as a sub-skill specialization of using fire type spells in the Destruction school. The more heavily you favor the fire spells, the more they will shine in comparison to the other types of damage in the school. No planning, no power-gaming, no forced specialization, just let the skill develop purely from how you play.

As for "you should need someone to teach you to quick shoot", I think this is fair. I would actually make you have to get training, and possibly perform quests to get that training before you can learn those perks. (In sub-skill skill training, this would mean that it would let you start putting skill xp into those perks.) It would make the trainers actually have a little more purpose. If you were dead-set on keeping specialization in the game, you could easily make some quests mutually exclusive, so that you cannot learn every perk in the game, at least without further modding.

Those are reasonable arguments. It's certainly a workable system.

I think the problem is that you either have to have a class system or a classless system. The two don't mix very well. You either have to disallow generalization (most games), penalize people for generalizing to force them to choose a class (which is what Skyrim does) or allow them to max out every skill. By definition, if you impose any limit on the skills, your promoting a class system. Even without classes a level cap imposes a sort of class system if it falls lower than the maximum possible gains; sooner or later you're going to run out of experience and won't be able to level up remaining skills (a sort of 'soft' class system). If you know you can't max everything, you have to decide where to put your focus.

Skyrim is interesting because it's a non-traditional class system where the player evolves the class through gameplay, but still has to make informed decisions about where to place perks. It's not a classless system, but a dynamically classed system. It's important to note that the system Skyrim uses works fine if you don't want to change your focus later on. It only penalizes people for changing careers. Or generalizing. Not really a "do what you want" unless you happen to know what you want to do fairly early on. I'm looking at you, power gamers! :glare: ...

Good luck with your mod. And thanks for the input!

People really need to look up what the word exploit means

I know. I abuse it shamelessly in the article. Just trying to keep with forum conventions.

Probably not the best policy, but meh. :shrug:

Justified criticism.

Best crafting "balance" quickfix would be to remove all crafting materials from every shop in the game forcing players to "get out there" balancing their ski...perks better, and make it scale forcing better materials or items. Unless the player had high lvl speechcraft (like a real trader should) enabling trading.
I too think systems should have been more skill based..

edit: It takes skill to use some perks and i love that, but hopefully know what i meant by it.

It's a well written article and not trash. There has always been and always will be an easy way to exploit certain skills. In Morrowind and oblivion you could create simple spells and cast them over and over until your magic skills were maxed, but the smithing skill does seem very OP In my opinion. I'm not saying it should be changed, because I personally don't care, but my biggest problem isn't the smithy exploit, it's that casting certain spells seem to have little to know effect on leveling me even while in dangerous situations or otherwise... If spam-creating a simple dagger can level you up in smithing, then casting mage light in dark caves should have a larger effect toward leveling Alteration.

The problem with that is that it seems arbitrary: there's no reason why blacksmiths, for example, shouldn't have iron ingots. People will just complain that it's not realistic. Unless you mean that crafting supplies shouldn't be available to players unless their Speech is high enough, which is an interesting idea. After all, why should I sell you materials if I'll make more money by selling you the finished goods? That's sensible and confers an advantage to combining Speech with Smithing.



You're right about the skill leveling in M/OB. I used to have to be careful not to accidentally use a skill! (Opposite of min/maxing?) Personally, my problem with crafting is not that they can be exploited (I mean, I don't abuse them so it makes no difference to me), my problem with them is that the progression seems a little too fluid. I want to encounter a bit of challenge to leveling up a skill (like in combat or picking a lock); selecting a menu option isn't really much of a challenge. I don't know about the spell casting issues because I haven't had a chance to use many of the spells yet, but they can probably be fixed with a bit of balancing.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

after reading the article and the this thread i have to say the article is not BAD but not ACCURATE either. something he gives as examples are just plain wrong like leveling weapon skills is DANGEROUS and risky while it is not. you can abuse them the same way as smithing just different :

go buy yourself a horse. start smacking the horse. it wont fight back. guess what? your COMBAT skills will level this way. if horse gets low hp. rest for 1 hour. horse has full hp again. repeat. riskless leveling of combat skills. you can level nearly ALL skills riskless if you know how. just because some moron players dont know how the game is not unplayable. catering to morons will just result in even more down dumping of the next releases. players should THINK when playing. not turning thier brain off. and they should be rewarded for THINKING.

the problem with the perks itself is that theres no way to reperk your character other than cheating via console or restarting. and this is where the failure begins. a reperk button would not have hurt the game at all. and it would have prevented many crys and whines.

the level scaling thing is NOT the main problem of the game this time. it was back in oblivion. but actually they did way better with level scaling this time.

BUT they messed up another very very very important part of any RPG instead.... the real reason people see smithing as overpowerd is because DEADRIC gear is the best thing you can get in skyrim. now lets look back to older parts of the series and see what has happend :

deadric gear was always there in tes games. its part of thier lore. but is was never the BEST gear in the entire game before. why you ask?

because there was UNIQUE POWERFUL LOOT in the world that easily surpassed normal deadric gear or selfmade entchantings.
and THIS is the real source of all this problems with crafting :

the utter lack of meaningful unique loot. all unique loot that exists is weak compared to the older series games OR bugged like hell e.g. ebony blade (no perk bonuses? no upgrading? WHY?).

take jewelery for another example : in older parts of the series there were always unique found items in this part which surpassed selfmade ones. why? because they had unique useful effects or more than just TWO entchants on them that where useful. such items are simply MISSING from skyrim. they dont even exist anymore.

and that is the part where bethesda has really failed hard this time. why have handcrafted dungeons when the loot you place is useless or just random and weak too? there is no reason. if loot is random dungeons can be random aswell. does not matter.

some dungeons contain a good story and have some special items in them. e.g. red eagle blade ghostblade and a few others. but nothing about these items that are supposed to be "LEGENDARY" weapons is legendary at all. they even LOOK the same as normal trash weapons and have a weak entchantment.

take the red eagles blade as an example here : in the book this weapon is discribed as a legendary FLAMING sword. after reading this book i tought back about TRUEFLAME from tribunal expansion in morrowind and got really excited about finding it.

but then the major disappointment happend : its just a normal ancient nord sword with a weak normal fire entchant. there is nothing unique or special about such an item why is it described as legendary sword at all when every vendor out there has ebony swords after lvl 30 which are FAR superior to this thing.

and that is were skyrim is really really bad and lacking. the devs where very lazy with loot designing this time. they spend to much time to worry about other things. but failing in a CORE element of any RPG is just plain wrong and deserves flames until they get it.

smthing is not broken in itself as a skill. yes the combing with the two other skills makes it op but this can be easiely fixed by implementing a cap on smithing improvements and limiting certain enchants like weapon damage.

yes the deadric artifacts are unique. but thier entchants and effects are WEAK this time with a very few exceptions and most of these exceptions suffer from bugs e.g. why can deadric artifacts not be upgraded with a deadric smithing perk? why is there no special perk for them atleast? its the same as above : bethesda did not spend enough time with simple loot design this time.

all they need to do is put major and minor skills back in, problem solved.

Thank you very much for the response, Nerevar X.

You can exploit the other skills, of course, but I think the difference is that with crafting skills there is only one way to use them. With something like combat, you normally raise them by fighting mobs, not whacking your horse. A player attacking his horse knows he's abusing the mechanic and is doing it just to exploit it. The same for people who climb up on ledges where they can't be reached and then "rain fire from above". Those are obvious exploits but people don't generally complain about them because anyone doing them knows that they're abusing the system and doesn't really want them to change it. It's a convenient hack.

The problem with crafting is that you can abuse them without realizing it. (Of course, you can intentionally do it, too, it which case it also works as a convenient hack.) Of course you know that you're creating very powerful items, but when you head down this path you don't know the game hasn't been balanced to account for it. That's because the only difference between using the system and abusing it is how often you do it. Players complain because it leaves it up to them to decide how much is too much instead of just imposing a limit. That and they don't realize when they start that the items they're making are the most powerful ones in the game (as you pointed out).

You could say that a player making 100 iron daggers knows he's abusing the system, too, but in this case it's like saying the game expects you to hit your horse a few times and rewards you for it but if you hit it more often you've done something wrong. Using the skill becomes ambiguous. Is it wrong to make 100 iron daggers or isn't it? It's obvious you're not supposed to attack your own horse. It's not obvious how often you should create the same item. The player can't really be faulted for picking the cheapest way to level because it really isn't an invalid way to play. Smiths make the same thing over and over, so why shouldn't players? It's 'broken' because it's ambiguous and encourages the wrong kind of behavior. Not broken in an absolute sense, but more in the sense 'non-optimal'.

As to your arguments about loot leveling, I'm not going to disagree with you. It seems this is a very common complaint and is supported by some good arguments. It's somewhat tangential to the main argument, but important to note. Thank you.

Again, everything I write is limited by the amount of time I can afford to invest in the game and by what I hear from other players, so it's inevitably going to be limited and flawed. I appreciate you taking the time to supplement my understanding of this complex system.

Maybe instead of leveling up skills gives us levels which gives us perk points, we could've had leveling up skills gives us perk points which, when used, gives us levels? That'd at least combat the "working on non-combat skills leads to being weaker in combat." Now, for there being no real way of making a smooth 'hybrid' with the perk system, I have came up for answer for that, too. With that said, my answer would require a complete overhaul on the perk system, so it's simply not feasible. The simplest way I can put it is I'd change the fact that each individual 'perk tree' exists on its own plane.