Word, this should be stickied lol.
Nothing wrong with complaining or criticism at all, but when you complain constantly about a game you spent a hundred hours on, repeatedly populating the forum with your complaints and charging huge conspiracies of 'dumbing down for the casuals', the problem is you, not the game.
Here's the thing about Skyrim -
Are the complaints made valid complaints of flaws that exist in game? 99% of the time, YES.
(I don't agree with the "RPG elements" arguments, because I believe that "RPG elements" mean things in game that allow you to build and develop a character - something Skyrim does better than any game I've ever played - not just "attributes", "numbers" and "dice rolls")
However, most of the complaints that are being made either 1.) don't look at anything else in the game, only specifically what is being complained about or 2.) are so minor and mundane that it's obvious the poster is grasping at straws to find something to complain about.
As for #1, people complain about the removed skills, but they don't look at the fact that we also got -ADDED- skills, and the fact that virtually every skill we did get became deeper and more customizable than we've ever had before. They just say "OH NOEZ THERE'S NO MYSTICISM, ATHLETICS OR TEH ACROBATICS" even though Mysticism
IS in the game, it was merged with Alteration, and while Athletics and Acrobatics were removed, those skills were replaced with Pickpocket and Enchanting, which offer more depth and more gameplay than "running" or "jumping". They just see that Armorer is gone, and fail to understand that it was replaced with a more involved, more in depth crafting system.
As for #2, people are grasping so hard for straws that they are either complaining about the petty flaws that the game does have (I.E.: NPC's don't -always- react to your accomplishments - even though they DO acknowledge your accomplishments and do so quite often, the complainers only focus on the occasional time that the NPC's -don't-), or they make claims that are just flat out false (I.E.: the Main Quest "forces" you to join guilds that you don't want to - my character who is a law abiding warrior and wouldn't have anything to do with the Thieves Guild, I never had to join the Thieves Guild with him, and no, I didn't have to take some unknown workaround to go directly into the Ratways to avoid it. I talked to the guy, did that part of the Main Quest, and somehow, was never a part of the Thieves Guild.)
And that's what I hate about the complaints. People are either resorting to the most petty of complaints about the game, or they are flat out making false claims about the game, and -THAT- is what they are using to criticize the game and Bethesda on. The most petty of details, or flat out untrue claims.
When the complaints are about the UI, an occasional bad NPC acknowledgment of the player's character, or the fact that there are less numbers, or flat out making things up like somehow saying Morrowind's directions were somehow magically more complex than Skyrim's quest arrows, then I take that as nothing more than entitled whining.
I can at least understand when people make claims about things like Spellmaking being removed, but even then it turns into nothing more then entitled whining when the arguments turn into nothing more than emotional sensationalism by claiming that Spellmaking was the single most important thing to the Elder Scrolls series, and magic simply cannot exist without it.
» Tue Jun 05, 2012 8:12 pm 
