read the post, then respond. Otherwise your just a troll.

I mentioned how I was punished for NOT exploiting the easily exploitable system. Thus, my complaint on level scaling is everything scales up to your level which isn't a power level. You could be level 10 with hardly any combat bonuses while the enemy EXPECTS you to be some decked out warrior that only fights 24/7.

My mage had a literal stop in gameplay. I hit a wall where I leveled too fast from working on all my trades and ended up fighting master spell casting mages that 1 shot me and my companion while i am stil lcasting apprentice spells. These enemies are in regular caves that usually had basic enemies that were faceroll but because of level scaling they were no longer faceroll and simply impossible to kill. Even on adept, they were way over thepower curve of my mage.

bump

Do we really need 50 threads an hour about 'balance"?

I know that every member thinks that his or her thoughts and manifestos are eye-opening and world shaking and everything, but FFS, give it a rest

How many threads now about WoW on this board? Seriously? Its like one of those zombie virus thingies!

OKAY! Time to challenge the foundation of the OP's point:

Level, HP, and the like are arbitrary, artificial constructs used to abstractly represent a character's development.

MMOs need World Scaling instead of Individual Level scaling to keep the Level 50s out of the same areas as the level 10s, and controlling population. WoW and other MMOs make no real pretense of character level actually representing power level.

Using WoW as an example:
How could a level 10 troll drive the entire Darkspear tribe (Including its World-boss leader and dozens of level 25-65(now 90?) guards) from the Echo Isles? How could a bunch of level-30 conspirators hope to take out the King of Stormwind? And recently... how did a level 10 British Nobleman kill the [censored] Queen of Azeroth in one shot? How does a level 10 Werewolf make any meaningful impact, much less lead in a conflict between the entirety of a What-do-you-mean-it's-not-Victorian-England and the might of the whole Legions of the Dead? And are we to believe that every soldier recruited to fight in Northrend was capable of taking out pre-cata Ragnaros?

Without other players, The Elder Scrolls games don't need to artificially increase the level of "zones" in the world to give the player appropriately-leveled content. Skyrim's especially good about this: for example, Giants and other "Atmospheric" creatures already walk the world, and provide the appropriate challenge at all levels. I've already shown how MMO-style "regions" don't make the quests actually make sense for the alleged power level of your character (You go from destroying the oppressors of your race and killing Returning Gods to basic gruntwork or picking flowers/searching poop for allegedly-useful junk)

TES keeps power levels within "reasonably human", because it's ludicrous to believe one can become a God just by swinging around a sword: Highly competant and nigh-unbeatable in melee combat, yes. Deific, no.

Furthermore, Skyrim's character advancement system isn't so much as showing your character becoming stronger, as much as revealing who he/she actually is. I wouldn't expect a master smith or merchant to be awesome in combat.

Excellent post.

I also shouldnt have to ever leave a city if i am a master smith as that would be my job and there would be no reason to leave. But then the game lost its focus which was to become some dragon slaying hero. I wouldnt expect a smith to be better then a warrior but if i dont get a "you win" when i hit high smithing, there should be no reason i should get WEAKER because of it.

How realistic is it that someone that practices smithing for myabe 3 hours in town somehow magically became weaker then everyone else in the world. What world do you come from where 1 day of training in a city means your the weakest around?

Notice how the pendulum swings both ways.

The OP is right is some regards.
They shouldnt of combined Oblivion and Fallout styled level scaling.

Morrowind IN MY OPINION has the best level scaling.

I love how so many people on these forums are too dumb to get a message. He's using it as an example. He's not actually saying he wants it to be a mmo or wow. But yes, I understand. They dropped the ball on lvl scaling again. Also, don't know if anyone has noticed, but all the enemies in caves and hideouts (silver hand for example) are retextured bandits if they arn't bandits already. Use a spell on one that isn't powerful enough to work. It will say on the top right.

Morrowind had great balance on all of the points you made here my friend.

This.

MMO's dont level scale so that at each level you have a specific place to go. Level scaling lets you go almost anywhere in the world that you want at any time instead of being funneled into one zone at a time. WoW pissed me off so bad at this. Sure, the game has like 33 zones, but you are only ever able to usefully be in like 1 or 2 at a time. It's so directed and lame. In Skyrim, however, I can go to like 80% of the game right off the bat. Then as I level and gain the advantage I need through skill and gear, I can go to the other 20%. That is what an OPEN WORLD game is.

I stopped reading as soon as I saw WoW

Wah! I can't exploit the game like I can other games. Wah! I juiced up my smithing and two-hand, but now get one-shotted by archers and cold cocked by bears. Uh, yeah, it IS fair. If you spend your time becoming a smith, even with a juiced up sword, should you really expect to take out those bandits so easily? What do you think THEY were doing while you were forging trinkets? My characters is pretty balanced dual-wield/archer. No problems with difficulties here. It's an R-P-G. Play it for what it is. You're a character in the story, not a gamer exploiting flaws to overwhelm the game. Don't like role-playing? Well, stick with whatever works for you. Obviously, it's not REAL role-playing.

I have only played one MMO, and guess what, it was not balanced, Warlock [censored] who summoned kittens destroyed everything (and yes im not making this up lol)
Such thing as perfect balance does not exist in any game, just learn to live with its flaws, you will end up enjoying the game more.

Give it a few more months...and mods, and the people crying for Bethesda to create a balanced game like this is supposed to be Blizzard will go quiet. It happened in Morrowind, it happened in Oblivion, and it will happen here. Whatever complaints you may have, can and will be addressed in the form of mods. If you bought the console version, then tough luck, because Bethesda didn't do a thing about Oblivion or Morrowind then. You aren't paying a monthly subscription so Bethesda doesn't have to do jack to keep classes and mechanics balanced for you. I guarantee if they even address any class balance (and it would be the first of its kind from them) there will be a cycle of complaints still coming in just like WoW. No thanks.

Herm... Right then.

1. Level scaling encounters is a good thing. Most players become bored very quickly when then game has no difficulty at all and can face-roll everything. Myself included. Changing the game-space into different level "zones" is something Bethesda specifically didn't want to do, as it is no longer a truly "Open world" game.

2. Blacksmithing need ONE thing done to it.. The process of leveling it and how far you can stack "+XX% Smithing" bonuses to it.... But if your going to come on here and [censored] about power-leveling Smithing and getting your butt handed to you in the early game due to lack of perks/combat skills.. Try not making a BLACKSMITH... Make a warrior who does Blacksmithing on the side.. Or better yet, use your new Smithing skills to create & upgrade better gear. I power leveled Smithing at level 25 and did fine.

3. Yes, Destruction needs scaling and magic based characters need there own equivalent of what Smithing does for warriors. Players should never rely on -100% mana cost in any of the magic schools.

4. Agreed in general. The largest problem with Smithing, enchanting, and Alchemy is how they have a synergistic effect on one another.. They are perfectly fine individually, except when a player starts stacking the same effect on enchanted items (I.E. magic cost or % damage to weapon types).

You didn't read the post so i am going to say 0/10 for trolling

while you almost came out sounding intelligent, your lack of understanding common English is scary. How you could read my post and then bring up something I specifically said I DIDN'T want to do as a point to talk down to me is funny. How could you get that from my post? Noobs will be noobs I guess.

you're comparing this to wow
any argument you could have possibly made is invalid
this is not an MMO
there's a reason I don't play WOW but do play this
they're completely different games

The community flamers are at work again...Guys, I'm starting to think that most of the community is just looking for posts like this so they can flame

They are not completely different. In fact, the similarities outweigh the differences. My examples were about RPGs in general. All rpgs follow roughly the same leveling system because they know what works and what dont work. Look at dark souls. Level scaling BUT never omfg impossible or LOLZ ez mode.

No...it most definitely does...you must have never encountered a twinked character who can blaze through anything and everything while leveling....as well at max lvls in wow u can one shot most everything...group encounters excluded because you know...theyre group encounters.

id point you to my previous post....wow is an incredibly easy game in every aspect leveling/endgame/arena....you just sound like youre not that great at this game.

Obvious troll is obvious.
Seriously, this is not an MMO. A totally different game. I love TES leveling system over arbitrary power improvement via level. If you don't like it, don't play it. If TES turned into WoW, I would never play it.

Interesting.

For someone who pretty much agrees on the majority of your points, your pretty rude. Better take that flame suit off for a minute to have an actual conversation. Never mind that I opened the window & began replying before you edited your OP.

The only skills that shouldn't have an effect on "level scaling" in the game are Lockpicking, Pickpocketing, and Speech... As they have little to no direct effect on combat itself. Yes, these three skills are good ways to accumulate gold and some items quickly, but still, non-combat skills shouldn't effect combat scaling.

Thanks for ignoring the rest of my post though. Especially on the subject of level scaling and the design of the world. Something Bethesda addressed themselves.

EDIT: Also, I've been playing on Master since 11/11/11, so your rants about the difficulty of the game are falling on def ears here.

Better to say that quality of solo gameplay is worse than a single player rpg.
In wow you do an lot of quests in an area to level up so you can move to the next, yes many of the quests in WOW are excellent, some even tops anything I have seen elsewhere, however the majority are pretty dull,

And I will not say the gameworld in WOW is much more realistic than level scaling in Skyrim. As you move some 100 meters the enemies become noticeable harder. The zones makes sense but not the changes inside a small zone where west is level 20 and east 30.
Will also say that the landmass in WOW is perhaps 10 times as large as Skyrim, with less place you had to cramp things much more.