Why does a chest have to have something good in it though?

Say I was in Skyrim, and I was a hunter, and I found myself a really nice chest and got a key made for it, the lock is of Master difficulty, but I'm just a hunter, all I have is some gold and some pelts to throw in it.

It's realistic to find crap, there is no universal rule that "if you have a lock of great quality then you HAVE TO have valuables in it."
Hell, at my locker at work I got a comb, a pair of worn down shoes and 7 pieces of blank paper.
That's not even Novice loot.

It has happened to all of us. We have all found a master chest, opened it, and found crap. Don't let it get you down, master chests get less exciting the higher level you go.

The main reward for picking master chest locks is the actual skill upgrade. If you don't have the treasure hunter perk, then it's not really worth the effort. Unless of course, you get 10 gold ingots!

Yes the quality of loot in this game is horrid. I mean beyond awful. The most gold i ever found in a burial urn was 15, and I'm an imperial. It's not even worth the time to look in random containers.

It's realistic to find crap sometimes, and to find serious loot more often. We're talking Master locks. How many bank vaults are filled with lint? How many people go and buy a $5000 safe for their home to store their combs? The lock on your locker cost what, about $10? That's a novice lock.

Realism is mostly great loot in tough locks. Balance is the opposite. It's tough to do both in this case, but can we please not confuse the issue? **

**Edit: It's not balance, it's a design decision by BGS. They put decent loot behind easy locks so that all players have access. They put junk loot behind master locks so they don't frustrate players. It's not realistic, and it's unbalancing, so it's the worst of both worlds.

Wow really? Seems rather obvious.. I'll keep that in mind.

Yeah, that's what i thought in Fallout 3 after finding a teddy bear in a safe

It's a rule of thumb in Beth's games: The better something is locked, the less valuable the stuff inside is.

Who says that the locks in Skyrim are all bought?
Some are found, some are created, some are bought.
One that is created or found could very well be by someone without any real valuables that just had luck/skill.

I agree that not all master locks will protect valuables, but most should.

Realism would involve an increase of the average value of items for each step up in lock difficulty. There would be few people capable of making the best locks, and anybody that good would be in the trade, selling their work (with rare exceptions). Unless Nirn is a very whimsical (to the point of comedy) place in general, most locks & locked chests would be sold to wealthy people to protect their most valuable property. The majority of this would be cash-valuable, though there would be sentimental items as well.

Over time, chests would fall into the hands of bandits or otherwise spread around the world (a bit), but this is the exception, and it would happen very slowly, because the most valuable stuff would be the most protected--hence the reason for the best locks in the first place.

As depicted by BGS, people in Nirn: leave their most valuable items laying around, store a few less valuable items 5 feet away protected by a cheap lock that a blind, feverish child could open, and store their junk 5 feet further away in the highest quality locks that exist.