I am a lever 33 in smithing, (several levels were attained through spamming (crafting) daggers).

I takes a long time to mine iron, killed several animals for the leather... so its really not an easy task.

So is spamming daggers considered cheating?
Will making more expensive items yeald more experience?

Thoughts?

I think it is a single player game, and each individual has to decide what is cheating and what isn't, and then decide if they care.

Tell you what- for me I spam daggers- OH YES. because smithing will never rise to even 60 (for arcane smith) without a significant amount of grinding, and since our junk doesn't deteriorate the only reason to smith would be to make something new or sharpen/harden something once.

If it worked differently, I might act differently, but it is good the grind is there and easy to get it over with. I am playing skyrim for the dungeons, not the blacksmithing. Blacksmithrim TES VI. Experience the exhilerating profession of a blacksmith. If you love blacksmithing, the game has given you the option not to grind daggers.

no it is not cheating, I do it to keep my smithing level around the level of which i find weapons and armor

that's part of the game, not cheating, and you need materials to do it, so you'll have to play to get them or the money to buy them.
I call cheating the oghma infinum glitch, because that wasn't supposed to happen

Of course not. Practice makes perfect. Spamming golf balls at the driving range will get you onto the PGA tour if you do it enough.

This will get a lot of attention...
No. Grinding, training, powerleveling...what ever you want to call it, is not cheating. You level up as you do it anyway. If you get ahead in the scaling, you will not stay at that level for very long. If it feels like an exploit then don't do it. It is your game.

Doesn't matter if someone else considers you are cheating, the question is will you feel you have cheated yourself.
I did it a harder way, my Altmer crafted Elven items and jewelry, didn't get to 100 until past level 50, and spent 30 levels more impecunious than necessary from buying moonstone. Felt like an achievement to finally max out, but it's up to you.

Pretty sure you get the same amount of exp no matter what you make. Iron is easily obtainable from blacksmiths, so is the leather you need, so daggers are really easy to make IMO. As far as the question whether or not it's cheating goes I think that's up to the player to decide, I make daggers to level up blacksmithing and I don't see it as an exploit or a cheat. Just use some moderation if you think you are leveling too fast.

Once you have enough money you can literally max out smithing in less than an hour. Its not cheating and I do this simply to get the items I want right away.

If you have gone out and farmed the materials I think it's fine to spam daggers because you have to level smithing 1 way or another. What else can you do really? If you keep using the wait function for shops to refill and just buying all the materials and spamming daggers, then I would consider that cheating. My general rule would be to say if your stopping yourself playing the game as you normally would just to level something, I would call it cheating. Using up materials you have collected on your travels is totally fine.

For me, the fun doesn't really start until I have a fully built character. I see that to be somewhere around level 45 - 55, pending the RP and the specialization of the character. I prefer a build-then-play type of gameplay. When I get a PC. It will cut out the grinding part. I can just start with a fully built char from the beginning. Some people enjoy the game for the building process. I am not one of those. We all play for different reasons.

EDIT : You are going to get there eventually. It doesn't matter how fast you get there.

Smithing, as it stands in the game, is really supposed to support your character. Problem is, unless you grind on it some, it will not go up to what you need for higher end crafting or improvement. Mostly because they took repair out of the equation there is no other way to increase this but make and improve stuff. Since the game provides for you the equipment you need as you go up, Smithing is not required to be successful. It just allows you to use weapons and armor that are above your level, as it were. If that's what you want, but you have to develop the skill for that.

So, you have to grind it some. The problem is if you grind it enough to level your character so it gets above it's combat skills. So, what I did was only grind on Smithing when the game started giving me armor and weapons in materials I could not craft. So, about every 4 or 5 character levels, I would go up 5 to 10 levels in Smithing. Kept everything in balance.I was not making better stuff than my character needed, and I was not leveling up my character without having the combat skills to handle the next levels.

I would space this out by pounding a couple of levels during each character level. Kind of like a way to unwind from a adventure, pound on some metal for relaxation was how I RP'd it. I did not have to Rinse/Repeat Merchants or end up with a ton of items to sell that would warp my Speech all out of whack.

If weapons needed to be sharpened (for some stupid reason they don't) then you wouldn't have to do this. I really fail to understand why weapons don't degrade like the previous games especially when they have all the tools available to smith them in this game?!? Dumbing down...

I will be getting the mod that allows this soon enough, and then smithing will progress correctly with the other skills.

No, its not cheating
It is exploiting a weakness in the experience mechanic for the Smithing skill though so I choose not to do it
Doesn't worry me if others do it, its their SP game and they're entitled to play it as they see fit

edit: I've never found it neccessary to grind Smithing, I just make gear for myself and any followers I use and for my character's jewellery collection

I don't see it as an exploit or a weakness. You have to raise it some way. That is about limited to training. Be that by paying for it or doing it yourself. Even if it took longer, you would need to grind more.

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The degrading of weapons would be alright, IF it was implemented properly. It makes absolutely no sense fro a Bow to start doing less damage after every shot.

Degrading weapons isn't that hard to implement. Bladed weapons & axes would need sharpening/repairing more often than Maces and bows and so forth. Also the cheaper the material of the item would require more frequent repairing/smithing. (I.E. an iron dagger would degrade faster than an ebony dagger)

Also you can enchant your weapon to have an ability that makes it like it is now and never degrade.

This is from RPG games from 10 years ago or older. It's nothing new and I seriously don't understand why the devs left it out of the game...

This was probably a change to step away from the PITA that oblivion did concerning weapon/armor degredation. They dropped it completely instead of refining it. But we also lost the ability to repair/craft things in the field when we lost our mortars to alchemy tables and our hammers to blacksmithing stations.

That brings great sadness to wanderers who hated constantly making runs into towns.

If it was cheating, then you would not be able to do it in the game unles you either used a mod or a cheat code.

I created a lot of potions so that I could level up.

No, it is only cheating if you do it excessively. I did craft a few leather bracers just to get my skill up, but only to get the perk I needed for improving gear that I already had. It felt as if my smithing skill was lacking behind and I had to do some catching up.

You do similar things in real life, too. When you fall behind do you do exercises to keep up.

I agree with both of those.

I don't think it is cheating. technically. I personally would view it as such but that is just because I'm a bit of a nerd who enjoys a challenge. This sort of game is good in that you can play it in tonnes of different ways and do what you want though.

No, not cheating per se. There is no way to get better at smithing - are there trainers - I forget....

But I would love to see repair in there. I never played previous TES games, but that sounds like a reasonable thing.

I don't think it's cheating, not in a single player game. But I do think it's really boring thus I don't do it. I found that my smithing skill increased quickly enough through my own natural playstyle. Collecting pelts from all the critters I killed while wandering the wilderness (I don't use fast travel, except via cart when I really don't have time to walk, so I usually have a lot of pelts), and making various pieces of leather armor for trading (and training) purposes gave me all the smithing experience I needed.

Nope it isn't cheating. My character is the largest supplier in all of Skyrim when it comes to iron daggers. He easily makes up for 89% of all daggers make in Skyrim. The iron daggers I see on bodies... they have my emblem on them. And when my character can't find a good provider he just takes his supplies to the black market.

Nope.
They decide to use a crap skill with a crap leveling system with a crap progression rate then I'm gonna abuse whatever is given to me so I can just get it over with.
So I do not consider it cheating in any sense what so ever.
Any form of grinding in this game I would not consider cheating.
Cause in order to get the skills up you have to grind or play for like 500 hours with one character.
And I barely managed 100 hours each for 2 characters.