I'm trying to make the game a bit challenging at least, but whatever I do I always hit a wall due to the unbelievable amount of idiotic gameplay mechanics Bethesda implemented.

As you probably know (you just have to if you ever played as a mage or archer) almost all melee enemies are completely unable to hit you if you play a ranged character and avoid their blows by simply backpedaling or running around a bit. Now I tried to reduce the backwards running speed a bit (among other things) and then I noticed why the game was so easy even though the backwards running speed is normally pretty low already (only ~205, regular running speed is 370 and sprinting is 500 even): when you run diagonally the backwards running speed is not applied, instead the left/right movement speed is applied. Doh. So basically you can run backwards at full speed. In any other game this would be an easily recognized and quickly fixed bug (I remember Deus Ex:HR had the same problem and it was fixed shortly after release), but not in a Beth game of course. Now I could reduce the left/right movement speed, but then dodging would become annoying and impossible so that is not what I want.

Does anyone know of a setting to fix this? I looked through game settings and the complete ini (the one you get when you type saveini in the console), but none of the settings I tried worked. I tried to implement a script, but messing with the speedmult is also not ideal as it doesn't update properly unless a new animation is triggered (another bug ). Plus now we finally have a distinction between backward and forward movement speed, but it's completely worthless. So I'd rather fix the existing system instead of writing a terribly complicated script that only works half the time due to other bugs. Ideas?