I was in Arcadia's shop making some potions and ran out of ingredients. I decided to just pay her to train me one level more up to 70, and then just pickpocket the gold back like a good thief. I noticed my chances to pickpocket 2060 in gold was 39% at 100 skill. I decided to put on my thieves guild boots which add 15% to your pickpocketing success rate before i gave it a shot. This decreased my chances of stealing the gold down to 29%. I took them off and my chances went back up to 39% with no other changes in my equipment.

What's going on here?

It isn't just those boots, it's anything that gives +pickpocketing in general. It's a bug that apparently lowers your pickpocket by that amount. So stay away from them for now until it's fixed, I guess

How do they not notice this? I don't want to here the bull [censored] excuses such as "Well with the size of the game there is bound to be glitches just be happy blah blah blah" This is a serious game play issue. How do you develop this game for years and not notice this before release? It is simply mind boggling to me that this sort of thing makes it way into a released game.

Im doing a game testing course and looking to get a job in it and trust me there is a TON more to games testing than what your aware of.

Testing normally starts from the 1st build of the game so its a continous thing until release they may have found it and fixed it but another bug may have brought it back and they missed it or somebody was slacking or simply nobody was told to replay the theif or pickpocket. Some minor bugs can be left until release so they may know about it and have a patch ready to fix it but due to time contraints they couldn't do it before launch.

There are lots of reasons its still in the game just wait a week for the patch and you should be fine, also its not game breaking its only game breaking if it stops you continuing the game not getting your gold back off some NPC.