Ridiculously unpredictable, more or less.

It would actually be kind of stupid if loot always scaled directly with lock quality. People do often have more security than they need. A person might have a safe one year with $100k in bearer bonds, then next year the bonds are spent but the safe remains. Or maybe another thief got there ahead of you.

I always figure it's a joke when I spend a bunch of lockpicks and time and get maybe 2 gold in a master locked chest that was behind a master locked door. No seriously, hahahaha...the joke was on me. If I wrote the game, I might do that too, heh.

It's a classic catch-22 of game design: if you make the fond loot better than anything you can craft them people wont want to make anything, but if you make handcrafted items better than anything you can find then there's not much point in looting. Unfortunately, there's no good solution to this, since anything you do will, by definition, be wrong, and get panned by the fans as a result.

Sicko.



More seriously, that always annoys me as well, as I've long been a proponent of the idea that the lock and loot should match. I know why they don't do it that way, but I don't necessarily agree with their reasoning; for one, they always fail to account for leveled locks (another mechanism I despise, btw), and for another, there are never enough Master-level locks that guard high-end loot (granted, what constitutes 'enough' is debatable) to really warrant their use.

Anyone on the internet should know by now that sarcasm is very hard to convey on the net unless said in such a way that it looks like sarcasm. In fact what you said (if really sarcasm) was badly done becuase it is possible that someone might take 20 minutes to get into a lock in this game if they`re really bad at it. What you should have said is it `took forever` and cost a `million locks` and then we might`ve seen it was sarcasm.

It was exaggeration, not sarcasm, and such an exaggeration is really difficult to tell from truth or not on a forum. You would`ve been better off to just be honest.

So no one`s at fault for thinking you were serious.

It wasn't for nothing. You must have gotten 3 lockpick levels out of that, at the very least.

wrong thread.

Skeleton Key. **** Nocturnal and her stupid temple.

One year, my cousin gave me coal for Christmas. It was my favorite gift that year...

All the best loot is in the unlocked chests.

Couldnt disagree more.

Another spoilt brat didn't get what he wanted, my heart bleeds.

It doesnt bother me because I don't open the master locks for the crap they put in them (I know there's not going to be a better weapon or amour and I already have enough gold), the reward for me is the skillup, that's far more important to me because it's a step closer to a perk, which is much more valuable than some more gold than I can't do anything with.

If I have a really bad time with a master lock then I can go up two skill levels with just one lock!.

I like the choice of smiles.

it always happened in every TES game, and in a lot of other RPGs and JRPGs.
for example: I remember playing Final Fantasy III (VI) on the SNES, fighting my way thru a horde of super hard monsters to reach a chest at the end of a tunnel, wasting tons of potions and revive items and what's in the chest? 1 gold.
It's just a classic thing, not much to be surprised with.

Personally, I only tackle master locks for the XP. The contents take second place.

No chest that is required for advancement in a quest has a lock that's required to be picked... except a few on the theives guild quest. Even there, they're not Master Level. Ignore those locks as even being there and you'll enjoy the game just as much.

It is rather silly from a game-play point of view - one would expect that higher level loot is better protected. But, from the other side of the argument is the view that, realistically, not every master chest will be used to hold good stuff. Im guessing that that is the reasoning behind the random loot - since a level 1 character can open a master lock, it could be 'game breaking' to always have high level loot in there. (i use the term 'game-breaking' loosely because in my opinion the whole concept of lockpicking is broken in Skyrim - the lockpicking skill tree is not needed to lockpick any chest).


If i had designed it, i would have had a higher percent of high level stuff in master chests, but made it harder to open them. In Morrowind, you could only open a level 100 lock if your Lockpicking skill was high enough. It was still possible to open the chests if you were lucky (either with a key, or spell, or potion to increase skills ) but it seemed more likely that better loot was inside. Also, another important point is that a medium level lock was easy to pick with a high skill, but hard to pick with a low skill. In Skyrim, a higher lockpicking skill actually means nothing (apart from allowing you to pick a set of, IMO, quite worthless perks). I can open a master chest at level 1 lockpicking - as i said before, that ( to me ) is broken; there is nothing to make me want to practice lockpicking.

(I know i've started talking about Morrowind - its not because of 'nostalgia', its simply because i think that it had a better way of doing it.) Just my opinion though, of course.

I don't think you understand.

Who was the owner of that chest? Maybe those were prized possessions of his? Maybe it's not just about the reward you receive for stealing someone's property? Maybe he was protecting what was dear to him?

Nice dikeens reference.

Sorry, but your thread title and tag suggest otherwise so don't be harsh on people who talk about other than the loot. Spening 20 minutes and 40 picks on master locks + Lockpicking broken tag = random loot in master chests svcks? /sarcasm. Should have titled the thread "opened a master lock and all I got was this lousy iron ingot and steel gauntlets. random loot broken.

Though I do agree that it would be nice if higher level locks gave a little better gear.

That is just what you think. What people lock up is however entirely different. The chests could be empty and the owner could have locked it out of a habit.

The difficulty of a lock comes with the chest, not with the content. Some owners keep valuables in high quality chests, but as you can see from the game do many not even lock their chests.

So stop expecting to get paid for picking a master lock. We do understand. It is only dumb of you to think this.

I don't know about anyone else, but it makes me chuckle in Beth games when I use up about six lockpicks on a very hard lock or somesuch, open it up and...
There's one lockpick in there. It should probably make me annoyed, but for some reason it makes me think the owner was a massive troll.
"Ok, so I've just inherited a chest from my grandfather with an incredibly hard to pick lock on it. I know! I'll put a single lockpick in it, so when someone picks it and loses loads of lockpicks, it'll be hilarious! "

Funny lock story. I was playing last night on a shiny new character (about level 8). I had a 16 for lock picking skill. I had 40 lock picks, because I hadn't attempted to pick a lock. So, my wife and my brother in law somehow get into a Skyrim discussion, because my wife (a non gamer) is trying to understand what is so engrossing about a silly game.

So, she watches me shoot a few skeletons, loot a few things. No big deal. It's like all the other games. I go to the chest, and it says 'locked: adept'

She says, "What does that mean." Brother in law says "That means with a lockpick of a 16 he ain't opening that."

I say that means it's locked and is medium difficulty to unlock it. She is stunned by this development. So, I bring up the minigame and show her how it works. My first lockpick breaks and she visably cringes. The next 10 or so attempts break pretty quick, each causing her to cringe (she hates when things break). And yes, before anyone says it, I stink at lock picking.

So, finally, it moves a little but snaps. Then a little more. The tension actually builds as the two of them watch and offer support, finally it clicks and they actually got excited about this.

The contents of the chest? Junk. And of course, she said "All that for some stupid junk?" And I said, yup. That's how it goes. But I gained a skill point and the better my skill gets the quicker and easier I can open locks. "Cool." she says and kinda stares at the screen.

Point being:

The fun we had trying to pick the lock is the payoff, not the loot inside. Sure, it can be a boring mechanic if you've done it hundreds of times, but bear in mind. Locked chests are in the game because a lot of us find picking locks to be fun. Sometimes we get a lot of good loot, sometimes we don't. I've found better stuff in an end table than in most chests. The locks are there to be picked, not to guard the queen's jewels.

Plus, for a moment I thought I might actually get my wife into gaming. Didn't happen as the conversation quickly turned to questions like Who owns that chest? Why would somebody leave their chest in a cave? Etc.

The OP's point was not how long it took, but that the reward wasn't worth messing with a MASTER lock.