Things are fun lv35 and below, but as soon as you start to get higher, thats when you start to notice the difference =/

One thing that would make the game have a much higher difficulty, especially for Assassins:

If enemies searched for more than three feet for you after being hit with an arrow.

but, that would mean an overhaul to the skyrim system.

yes. i agree.

First of all, try roleplaying. Second of all, gimp yourself, but not to the extreme. I play on Adept, I do not use enchantments unless I play a mage. I level Smithing in accordance wth my level, Level 10 - 30, Level 20 - 60. Level 30 - 75, Level 45 - 100. I equip Armor based on level, for example, I usually equip Daedric/Dragonscale/Dragonplate at level 45. And I don't take certain overpowered perks.I'm playing like this and I find Adept challenging. Eventually I'll start playing on Expert with DiD and no fast travel. So yeah, it is your fault, I made the same mistake you did.

If you're level 25 with a full set of Daedric Armor, a 132% increase in One-Handed Damage, Dual-Wielding Daedric Swords with Dual Savagery then yeah, of course the game is going to be easy, even on master.

Atleast in RPGs you can choose how hard the game is. I find First Person Shooters to be incredibly easy, even on their highest difficulty (I'm talking about FPS campaigns).

Such a terrible mindset.

If you find yourself wanting a challenge, go play Dark Souls. You'll die plenty of times.

Challenge =/= dying all the time.

level 30 = god.

point proven.

IMO, the "best he/she could muster" approach doesn't work in TES games. In Morrowind and Oblivion I would always deliberately gimp my characters starting around level 30 in order to keep the games fun. I think Skyrim is even easier.

This. You will (probably) have more fun playing different characters, and using different strategies (though the amount of possible strategies is somewhat limited in Skyrim).

The obvious ones are pure mage, pure warrior, pure thief. Each plays differently. Only do quests that fit your character's personality, only join factions that match the personality and character type. There are other options, too. Try playing a pure-sneak character. Doesn't have to be a thief, and the goal is to never fight. You won't accomplish this, i.e. 100%, but always try to finish every quest and every dungeon purely through stealth. Try a character who is all about alchemy.

And of course dead-is-dead will add a lot of drama to gameplay.

Kind of drives home the point that something is wrong, don't you think?

It's around level 30 when the combat becomes "one hit kill or be one hit killed", and as enemies stop scaling at level 50, anything more than that means the "or be one hit killed" part starts disappearing too. Still, in an RPG you should be able to become more powerful than most anything you encounter, in Skyrim that just happens with too little effort

I fixed the problem by self-gimping, and found it had three very fortunate side-effects: it enhanced my roleplaying, allowed me to enjoy smithing without becoming overpowered, and made my guy look really cool in his low-level gear. My guy is a pure archer, is level 36 and has always used a long bow, which was his father's treasured bow. He also uses hide armor because speed is very important to him. Finally, he only uses iron arrows because they're the perfect length for his long bow. Because neither the long bow nor the hide can be improved past flawless, it keeps the game challenging.

With a little creativity OP, you too can make the game fun again. If you want to make a sword character, consider RPing that he was Bolar's pupil, and take up his katana. Use nothing but that.

You're "supposed" to be stronger than everything else at level 35-50.I really don't get all these complains about difficulty,either don't use the best equipment or restart with a new char when the game gets too easy. More monster scaling #### is only going to create more problems and make leveling unsatisfactory and meaningless(as was the case with Oblivion).The leveling needs to be slower however and the AI is in dire need of some fixing.

So... in order to be challenged, I have to a) not play how I want to, or b.) make a new character while still not playing how I want to.

Makes sense.

Says who? The overwhelming majority of RPGs keep the difficulty pretty constant throughout the game. You become more powerful, but face more dangerous opponents as well. That's how it should be. No one wants to play a game where you switch your brain off and steamroll a bunch of gnats.

No that's not how it should be IMO.I don't want to feel like im RPing a cripple at lv 50.Bethesda should just add professional difficulty or something for those of you that do want this.Keep the level scaling at minimum,please.

I wasn't aware that the only way to add challenge at level 50 was to make the player a cripple.

The game is most fun during levels 10-30/40 (depending on build). After that I tend to restart.
Edit: The big problem here is that I have typically done nothing in the game by the time I reach level 30/40.

Not entirely true. When high in level I expect the early enemies I faced to become easy. I don't want endless variants in power of the same creatures (brown bear, cave bear, snow bear etc). And I also don't want Oblivions constant supermonsters (Ogres, Minotaur Lord) in places I certainly didn't expect to find them. And for hardware consistency, neither do I want hordes of low level enemies so that low level systems can't enjoy the game at high level characters.

For the characters I tend to make (sneak hunter/archer), combined with my rather careful playstyle (I run away from nearly anything in the beginning ), I've found that with a little bit of focus and not a whole lot of "take advantage of everything you know" gaming, master difficulty should actually be the normal difficulty. In old dice games, no matter your level, any players who didn't try hard to roleplay to the best of the characters abilities, tended to be punished by the GM by getting killed or at least some near death thingie going on. The GM knew your abilities and based the game around that.

Could such an anolytical approach be made algorithmically? Like, monitoring your successrate and adjusting accordingly? I don't know, sounds like a difficult task, and well known exploits (like "faking the difficulty") might be hard to avoid.

Btw, I try to limit my own crafting such that I only pick perks in one (typically only strength perks and arcane perks in the smithing tree), while leveling up the others (no perks) solely to play the money game, since some skills doesn't level naturally for me. I don't feel like I'm exploiting anything playing this way, only playing what I expect you are supposed to play.

Frustration on master difficulty, is only obtained in the beginning of the game and only if you expect to win everything you face and/or don't ever run away. I don't want the end game to be constantly frustrating of course, but SOME challenges every now and then would enhance the game infinitely. Unreasonable self gimping or "pure destro builds" (which doesn't make sense to me in the first place, from a survivability standpoint), is not the way to go. We need some added frustrations also for other classes, especially in the end game.

I'm a lousy game player, and i'll wager lots older than the average here... I use an xbox.

I find that if you're not a "gamer" Skyrim can still be a challenge at higher levers. My skill sets mirror my character for the most part, except I did make plenty of daggers to help smithing, and persuaded that guy in Riften a bit much....

I am now approaching the point where it is getting easier, but being a noob has its virtues - I still screw up and find the Oh S%$T moment. The game world is big enough to keep me moving along. I'll see if it gets boring. It might. I can see why.

Isn't the purpose of RPG progression to make yourself more powerful than what the game can throw at you?

Nope. It's to face new and more dangerous / interesting foes. You didn't see Gandalf one-shotting the Balrog in the movies, did you?

Try the wars of skyrim mod. It makes the game fun again after you would normally become godlike on master. 99% of the problems and complaints on this board are fixed by mods.

Try these two mods:

Deadly Dragons
Skyrim Wars

Don't play past level 26ish. You will start to become more powerful than most enemies at that point. That's how the game is and only mods can change it.

Do you want to be treated like an advlt or not? If so then you decide how easy or hard you want the game to be for each playthrough. Because I would say leveling up 100 and getting the best armor and weapons then complaining about things being easy is a terrible mindset.

Start a new game, pick nord/imperial/breton. Make him have long brown hair and a chin beard, make his skin pale. Only wear iron helmet, studded armor, iron gauntlets, and iron boots.

For weapons limit yourself to only steel sword, steel dagger, banded iron shield, magic, hunting bow, and iron arrows. This is what I call the Dovahkiin challenge. Your basically recreating the guy in the trailer and playing as him. I'm doing it now and it is way more fun than my overpowered Breton spellsword.

You can use smithing to upgrade your low quality equipment and make armor and weapons for your companions. For attributes, health and stamina are the most important, put a little magic if you want.

For perks, max out one handed for sword type weapons(duel wield is optional), max out block. max one side of smithing, if your gonna put perks in armor choose heavy since your wearing mostly heavy. You can also put perks into magic and archery all depends on how much you use it.