?!?
Especially if you started with P&P you should understand the problem even better.
In a pen&paper RPG the gamemaster won't allow overpowered [censored], or he'd just adjust the enemies in his adventures accordingly. Still what you can always do in a P&P RPG is -one of the most the essential things of RPGing-:
Develop your character to get more mighty.
There IS NO self gimping in P&P RPGs ... NEVER. It's the job of the GM to create a good (and balanced out) experience, as it's the job of a video game developer to create a balanced game.

With overpowered stuff like Smithing in Skyrim, the whole character development gets meaningless. If you want to get strong (which is -again- one of the main-aspects of RPGing), you can do that very fast, making looting, exploring, leveling, etc. completely meaningless.

Then peepz like you come with their "hey, just do self gimping". But the simple answer for that is:
- I don't play RPGs to practice self-control.
- And even though you can still have some fun in Skyrim, the game is wasting HUGE potential.
Essentially there is no meaning in some of its MAIN CONCEPTS. The whole idea of exploring gets meaningless, if there's no reason to do so.

Then even some idiots come with: "Just roleplay .. don't use it, if you think it's overpowered."
- IF you actually DO roleplay, than this is the most idiotic thing, one could think of. You are playing the role of your character ... why FFS should you not use the stuff to get mighty, if this clearly is what your character wants?
- Again the exploring-example:
Why should a character in Skyrim decide to crawl dungeons, if he already knows, that there will be nothing special, nothing mystic, nothing he needs, nothing he can benefit from?
You might still do it to see the games content, but if you're roleplaying you rather wouldn't, because from your characters point of view there's no reason.

And yes .. I know, there are still the shout-walls, which offer at least a little motivation for exploring (not for my mage though, since she doesn't care about dragons, and hasn't even visited Bleakfalls Barrows).



A good balance is, what EVERY RPG (and most games anyways) needs. It has NOTHING to do with being mutliplayer or singleplayer.
A good balance and well thought out gameplay-mechanics are needed to make the game work. If some mechanics are CANCELING out a lot of other mechanics, than the game is just less fun than it could be.

Most of the moderators do not work for Bethesda. The moderators are community users like you or me, with a record of good behaviour, who get invited to become a moderator.

Your methodology would be better if we all made a signed petition and mailed it to Bethesda. That would ensure that they actually saw it.

@Otheral - I think Merrari's point was actually that, unlike the other dungeon crawling games of the day, Arena actually did have spell making and allowed more player choice.

It cost a lot of gold to use the spellmaker in Oblvion, even the ones you owned (for example at the mages tower DLC)

Who exactly were you paying?