Ok now that i have that understanding i guess what i feel would make more sense to me personally is to still have many of those dungeons stay the way they are. Then add or fix some dungeons to be static. So maybe certain dungeons with certain powerful artifacts could be changed to static dungeons. Then keep many of the dungeons the way they are.

Static Dungeons Project
- an attempt to make dungeons more rewarding by hand-placing loot and enemies

(Check out the section "where do I sign up" if you're interested in helping. Not much commitment is needed! Any help is valued greatly.)

Preface
In Morrowind, the problem with leveling was that the player soon became too powerful and could kill anything in one blow, since all dungeons (except Daedric ones) had static, hand-placed enemies and loot that you quickly out-leveled.
In Oblivion, they tried to solve Morrowind's issues by scaling everything to your level. The problem with this was that no dungeon felt unique.
In Skyrim, they fixed Morrowind's problems by making the player's leveling grind to a halt naturally at (correct me if I'm wrong) somewhere around 50+ - but they still kept Oblivions level scaling! Why? Surely Morrowind's issues were solved by restricting how far the player could progress?

Sure, it's a more restricted version of Oblivion's system, but the drawbacks are still obvious:
No uniquely named items in 99% of the dungeons, and the unique items you do find are adjusted to your level. Daedric artefacts are outshone by that "Dwemer Sword of Blah" you found in an earlier dungeon, making the artefact hardly worthy of its title, and robbing you of a sense of fulfilment.
Enemies are in 99% of the cases named "bandit" or some similar generic name (as opposed to Morrowind where even bandits had real names), and bosses drop loot adjusted to your level in an "X of Y" format (example: "Orcish Dagger of Smiting").

...and more, but I hope you get the point. There is a lot of talk about the scaling deciding the difficulty of the game, but it has a huge impact on immersion and variation as well! Fighting through a dungeon only to realize the end is nothing unique and the reward is simply an item that was generated on the spot by the game (and is usually complete vendor trash), and the boss is a generic "Bandit Chief" is an immersion and joy killer for me.
Mods like OOO had hundreds of hours invested in them to make the scaling more sensible; so this time around, couldn't we just do away with the scaling and do it properly from the beginning?

What I want to accomplish
The game has around 150 dungeons. What I propose is that we gather information about all the game's dungeons and when we have an exhaustive list, we go through them and replace the scaled items and enemies with static ones, with levels based on the information we gathered.
What quests take place in the dungeon?
Where is it located?
Does it contain a boss or an artefact?
What's the backstory?

...and so on. This work can obviously begin before the Creation Kit is released!

Future steps are to add unique named bosses and items to create truly interesting endings to dungeons. Depending on how many are interested, extra artefacts such as Chrysamere and Ice-blade of the Monarch from Morrowind may be added as rewards.

To illustrate what I mean:
In Morrowind, every humanoid enemy is hand placed with hand picked loot and skills. Every character has a unique name. Every magic item is placed there by the one who designed the dungeon, and the level, rewards and difficulty is exactly what the designer intended.
In Skyrim and Oblivion, on the other hand, enemies are generic ("Bandit" and "Bandit Chief" for example) and their loot and skills are adjusted by the players level. Almost no powerful item is hand placed in any dungeon, but instead, they simply start appearing in dungeons when the game thinks the player is powerful enough. This is obviously not very immersive.

Where do I sign up?
I have created a google-docs spreadsheet and filled in the information of a few dungeons.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ai_PZ3oVoL9BdHlUX2RSQjk4alpnSXk3WFdOV2ZBWXc
What you need to do to help out is simply to access this document (if the privacy settings are correct, you should only have to PM me your gmail address so that I can add you to the list of people allowed to edit the document (so that it isn't vandalized)) and type in information about every dungeon you go through!
When completing a dungeon, simply tab out and fill in the relevant information about the dungeon. If information already exists, check it out so that it is proper and add whatever additional/corrected information you may have gathered.
This is obviously not some kind of employment thing where you are expected to grind through dungeons for the sake of the mod, but rather a casual thing to help out with after clearing a dungeon when playing the game as you normally would. Agreeing to help out doesn't force you to enter any information at all.
If enough people join in, it should be filled in no-time!
When all dungeons are accounted for, we move on to the next phase - but for now, this is all we need to do.

Guidelines for helping out

• Dungeons that have sub-dungeons are only listed once, no sub-parts (for example in the case of "Geirmund's Hall" and "Geirmund's Hall Crypts", only the former dungeon is to be listed.
  
• Areas like Valtheim Towers or Orphan Rock, a.k.a. outside areas without any actual dungeon which still contain a select set of enemies around a specific landmark can also be listed. Dungeons which have a group of enemies outside the entrance should have information about this entered in the "enemies outside" column.
  
• Please use proper grammar and explain things properly! Everyone has to know what you are talking about.
  
• Dungeons that contain legendary artefacts should be ~50+ in level, whereas a bandit camp close to a city should be a low level unless it's involved in a difficult quest.
  
• The column "boss fight" refers to any enemy in the dungeon who is a lot stronger than the rest of the enemies in there; not necessarily a uniquely named or scripted one. For example a large dwemer golem in the last room of the dungeon when there has been no other golem before it qualifies as a boss.
  
• The column "remoteness" should take into account how far the dungeon is from civilization and how difficult it is to get to it. 1 means right next to a city and 10 means on a remote mountaintop in who-knows-where.
  
• Use common sense, please

Final words
As I said in the title, this is both a WIP and an interest check. If it becomes obvious that I'm the only one who tries to work on this, I will simply scrap it since I don't have infinite amounts of spare time to work on this.

Now, what say ye? I'm quite confident this should be doable.

A complete removal of scaling would... svck.

You would have to do it one of two ways. One, items and monsters would have to be kept around the same level near eachother. If you have a static dungeon, with level 5 monsters in it, but then throw a Daedric greatsword into it you will have a level 2 player with a Daedric greatsword and then that player will never upgrade or have any desire to upgrade their weapon at that point. Morrowind had a few problems because of this. If you knew where to get the best/weapons armor, you could go there early on, get those items and then never use anything else. Defeats the purpose of item variety. Static leveling of monsters means not only is everything always the same for everybody, but if you have dungeons and areas containing static level enemies the player will have no choice but to be railroaded through those areas. If Whiterun Hold is level 0-10 and Farkeath is 11-20 players can only reasonably do those areas in that order.

Well, obviously you think that quote is pure madness since you apparently ignored everything I said in there. Especially the part about level-scaling being more than just a difficulty adjuster, since you just continue in the same pattern of thinking as your last post.
And about being "overly defensive", what do you expect me to say? You come in to my WIP thread and say that my mod is a bad idea, and you expect me to shower you with roses? If you chide my ideas I will obviously reply. I don't remember insulting you; I have just stated my opinions. If you want to defend level scaling you can go to the "Level scaling mod" thread which is a discussion thread.

And for the record I must have played Skyrim for 35-40 hours by now. Everything is great except for the level scaling which I have so far experienced as keeping me on a rail in terms of item-progression; hence this mod idea.

Oh, huh. I thought that part of this was an interest check thread. I was just mentioning some potential pitfalls to the system and thought you actually wanted input on the idea. It appears that it's already become an "us vs them" thread though. Here are the main points that I have to offer:

1. Outleveling content will make that content meaningless and boring.
2. Static items means the same experience on every playthrough.
3. Static items means that you can never go back to a dungeon and replay it in the same playthrough.
4. It causes the game to become more linear as you are locked out of much or the content until you hit a certain level. You have far less choices about what you want to do, when you want to do it, as is the case in the current game.

Really, because of the sheer gargantuan amount of content in Skyrim, keeping it static would remove interesting play throughs by trivializing the content too quickly. It was an issue that Morrowind suffered from severely and it was an issue that Oblivion smashed with a sledgehammer. Skyrim has actually done pretty well this time around.

And can you please stop with the "obviously you haven't read what I wrote" stuff. You keep saying that to everyone. I read what you wrote and I thought it was fractured and inflammatory.


Good luck with the mod though. It's going to take an insane amount of work to accomplish. You'll likely need at least a few other people to get it done.

Oh, huh. I thought that part of this was an interest check thread. I was just mentioning some potential pitfalls to the system and thought you actually wanted input on the idea. It appears that it's already become an "us vs them" thread though.

in my opinion, leave these alone and focus on making great brand-new dungeons that aren't scaled.
The modding community should, this time around, focus on making DLC-like mods, rather than fixing what's already here.

Why?

Because Skyrim isn't broken, unlike Oblivion. The only reason 'fixing' was a huge part of oblivion modding is because the game was broken. But Skyrim isn't, so the modding community can go back to the Morrowind days - where we used to make new content rather than fix the old content.

Skyrim isn't statistically broken; that is, there are enemies that do give you a challenge and the weapons you find are sometimes legitimate upgrades. There is nothing wrong with gameplay, as far as I've experienced.

Well, that's great and all, but what is broken, in my opinion (and what I want to correct with this mod), is the immersion. Something that has become some sort of a slogan for me (or a boring tirade, depending on who you ask), is that a static gameworld gives the impression of a living, breathing world that has existed long before the player did, and everything you see is there for a reason that has nothing to do with you; whereas when level scaling is introduced, the world starts correcting itself after the player, as if everything revolves around him. This fact is what makes me feel disenchanted with every dungeon I enter. No matter how well the difficulty scales and how much of a challenge I face, I know that this feeling is completely artificial and the dungeon has been build around me, rather than being an ancient dungeon containing legends from untold eras. For me, the magic of entering a dungeon for the first time in Morrowind is nowhere to be found in Skyrim.

No offense, but you're wrong? There are dungeons and areas in this game where upon entering you will die a most horrible death, because the mobs are so far above your level. All but a few unique items in this game are hand-placed, the problem is there isn't a lot of them, that's a content problem, not a scaling one. Dungeons remain forever locked at a level upon entry, and regions for the most part stay locked as well, with the added caveat that a few higher level mobs will be roaming around that are at, or around your current level.

No offense, but you're wrong? There are dungeons and areas in this game where upon entering you will die a most horrible death, because the mobs are so far above your level. All but a few unique items in this game are hand-placed, the problem is there isn't a lot of them, that's a content problem, not a scaling one. Dungeons remain forever locked at a level upon entry, and regions for the most part stay locked as well, with the added caveat that a few higher level mobs will be roaming around that are at, or around your current level.

Dude, you completely missed my point; and I can't be wrong since what I expressed was an opinion. I am honestly baffled by your statement as I didn't even present any facts in the post you quoted, so how could I be wrong about it? About what?
Also, you don't seem to understand how the scaling works. First of all, most things that lie here and there in the dungeons are hand placed, but they are never anything special and only there to create an atmosphere (iron maces on altars, minor health potions thrown in a corner and so on). The actual loot that you want to pick up (usually contained in chests) is however scaled, and so is the gear that enemies use. I don't know if you realize, but scaled loot and rewards isn't about an elven dagger picked up at level 10 being less powerful than the same item picked up at level 20. Scaled loot means that if you went in to a dungeon at a certain level, an elven dagger might be laying there, but if you'd have entered the dungeon at a later level it wouldn't have been an elven dagger, but rather a glass one. Skyrim restricts this scaling more than Oblivion, but what it does is more than enough to ruin my sense of immersion.

And your point about "dying a horrible death" makes no sense in reply to my post either, since I specifically said that I think the difficulty scaling works well. What are you even arguing against?

When you lock a dungeon, not only do the mobs get locked but the loot as well, so unless Beth has lied and I'm blind, loot doesn't scale this way at all? If you enter a dungeon at level 5, and it has iron in it, but you reload a previous save raise you level to 15, enter the dungeon for the first time again, thus locking it, loot and mobs will still have all iron, unless the dungeon has a ridiculous level range like 5-20, but they shouldn't have a ridiculous range like that.

When you lock a dungeon, not only do the mobs get locked but the loot as well, so unless Beth has lied and I'm blind, loot doesn't scale this way at all? If you enter a dungeon at level 5, and it has iron in it, but you reload a previous save raise you level to 15, enter the dungeon for the first time again, thus locking it, loot and mobs will still have all iron, unless the dungeon has a ridiculous level range like 5-20, but they shouldn't have a ridiculous range like that.

They shouldn't have a range at all

What is the difference between a fixed dungeon with level 25 mobs, and a dungeon with a level range of 20-25, or 25-30, or even 20-30? A mob 2-3 levels below you should still give you a bit of trouble especially if you're playing a higher difficultly, and mobs 2-3 higher than you will still be killable, while providing a nice challenge. In both types, there is room for hand-placed loot, because in Skyrim's level-scaling it does allow for hand-placed items even in their level ranged dungeons. I'm really curious, why Skyrim's level-scaling is so offensive, not Oblivion's, or any other game, Skyrim's vastly improved system.

Oblivions level scaling WAS bad and numerous attempts WERE made to combat it. Skyrim's system is vastly improved, I'll give you that.

Here's the difference: With scaling of any kind, you will face generic enemies that culminates in a treasure chest with randomized weapons tailored to the player, because you're oh so special. If I'm level 10, why not have a chance at finding some awesome stuff? I purposely stopped leveling to see the effects of it - turns out you can't find better stuff at level 12 no matter what. You will never ever ever find ebony. That's bad.

I didn't play MW, but if as you guys say in that game you could come across a dungeon, enter to find you're outmatched, fight through somehow, and at the end find a great weapon, piece of armor, and the great feeling it gave you. I can understand that. That is in this game as well? While exploring you come across a dungeon, enter to find you're outmatched, fight through somehow, and at the end find a great weapon, piece of armor, and a nice satisfied feeling?

Some might be satisfied with that, but I, and I hope many others, am not. This is an example of what can happen in Morrowind:

Imagine entering a nondescript cave that has no special or flashy adornments, it seems like any other cave. You are around level 40, but you encounter many difficult enemies and you really have to fight to get in there and slash your way to the end. Completely unexpectedly when looting one of the final enemies, you realize that she is carrying the legendary sword Chrysamere - a sword that is mentioned in books and has legendary powers. The feeling of joy over completely unexpectedly finding this unique and legendary weapon and seeing that it truly is great (the highest base stats of any two-handed sword in the game, if I remember correctly), is such a feeling of joy that even if your two-handed skill is abysmal, you take it with you and proudly place it in your home to remind you of an awesome adventure.

This will practically never happen in Skyrim, because 99% of all dungeons end with a level-scaled boss with generic loot generated on the spot. The handful of truly unique items that do exist in Skyrim won't allow you to have an adventure like this either, since they are practically always tightly bound to a quest, and thus the dungeon containing the reward is often locked until you accept the related quest - or the item may simply be a quest reward and unattainable otherwise.

That is the feeling of mystery and magic I want back.

Also I would very much like a mod where Glass, Daedric, Ebony, is a lot harder to obtain.

While I disagree with your "complains", I like your suggestions regarding unique loot and unique hard bosses (to the dungeons that deserve them), so... If you need someone to help you collecting information about dungeons (their mobs, loot, quests, backstory, etc) you can count with me.