I stated twice in this thread alone, that the level scaling went off the charts in Oblivion. Less level scaling preferred? Less then Oblivion: sure - anytime. Where is that even disputed and by who? No one as far as I can tell.

That's however not an argument or even prove that level scaling inherently is evil / lazy design / unnecessary and making games worse then without it. And I think I brought a few arguments on why that's not the case, especially with Morrowind and Skyrim, that nobody so far could disprove.

No scaling worked pretty well for Gothic and Fallout 1/2. In Gothic's case while it didn't use actual level scaling, it had incremental scaling of the CONTENT, so all creatures and areas were designed by hand to gradually increase in difficulty, if you player wants to jump ahead then they can but the difficulty is much higher, but the potential of finding some nice high-level loot is also higher.

In Fallout's case they got around the scaling problem not so much by content, but by making the leveling system very slow, the player can spend a long time at the same level with no changes to their stats and skills.

What? Where? I pointed out problems that would occur with level scaling being completely removed from Skyrim. Of all the guys, he came up with solutions that actually work on reducing (not avoiding - big difference) it. And guess what? Turns out that's pretty much what IS done in Skyrim already and what all critics of level scaling either didn't know or failed to even consider.

You want it reduced even more or get rid of it completely? You better start turning to the problems pointed out that would occur. Like how to distribute low, mid, high areas / dungeons in a game, balancing it for 30 hours vs 100+ hours play through, with 300 locations. How to determine / predict at which lvl point the player chooses to join which guild, to avoid going with a lvl 30 or 60 char in a lvl 15 or 50 boss fight (be sure to pick all possible options here) to become head honcho - I'm pretty sure THAT would get bashed and called bad game design, with you being in the first row....

Thing is: you can get the challenge / high level areas / loot with vanilla Skyrim. Not enough? Stop playing on Adept difficulty. Go for Master or even Legendary where a pack of 3 Skeevers in the first dungeon become life threatening for your lvl 3 char. Not what you want? Go with a low lvl against a Dragon Priest and you've just gotten yourself a though to epic (depending on difficulty) fight with great loot. Head with your lvl 1 char to Solstheim where most non-wildlife creatures start with lvl 20 and corresponding loot.
But I forget, you could do that in M&M 6, but failed doing so in Morrowind - so it can't work in Skyrim and it's got to be level scaling which is to blame....

Even bigger thing: Use mods? You know, instead of forcing everyone else to play YOUR vision of the game, which is so much better, simply because you said so?
Requiem actually did change almost every leveled aspect to static. Though I really have no idea how he implemented guilds and there's no mentioning of them in the Readme, so expect to get stuck at certain points.

Also worth mentioning: there's two big overhaul mods currently for Skyrim, both being exclusive on Nexus and not on Steam workshop afaik. Skyrim Redone which basically just replaces the perk system with 673k unique downloads and the above mentioned Requiem with 57k unique downloads. Please compare that with the confirmed nearly 3 million boxed PC units sold (not including DD). Yes, claim casual all you want, you're still the (very vocal) minority.

According to you, the OP is spot on. No he's not - at all.
Pokemon - avoiding it with level cap being 100? Skyrim's cap is 80, Morrowind's (legit) cap is 77.5....
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat - getting weapons that deal more damage has the drawback that ammunition for them is more scarce - availability of Ebony / Daedric weapons / arrows vs Iron? The better the more scarce? Check.
"The purpose of leveling up in games is to provide a sense of growth. Increasing the time it takes to kill enemies as you level up does the opposite." - Not the case in Skyrim. Or Mass Effect. Or Dragon Age.

You practically demand to restrict the gameworld, cut off / delay certain quest / guild (with that phat loot) advancements, forcing players lacking your mad skills to follow a given path or to resort to grinding. You're taking out a lot of options and adding little, while ignoring the paths you could take, to get that experience you wanted.
That's supposed to be a better game? For the last time: more options not being a weakness for an RPG.

It did? Oh yes, a complete respawn of the world with different enemies, going through the same content / locations 2 or 3 times (can't remember / brain trying to suppress unpleasant memories) is such a innovative, rewarding and brilliant game design. Not to mention how believable and immersive it came over.... that's clearly the better way to go and you have to wonder, why Piranha Bytes 10 years later remained pretty much the only studio, to go down that road with Gothic and Risen.....

I give one credit for uniqueness, but that's about it.

Ok so sometimes level scaling can be not totally horrible,maybe only midly annoying like in Skyrim or Wizardry 8. Thats really a great argument for it! Thats like saying, hey quick time events usually suck, but sometimes they arent totally horrible, so lets have them instead of better normal gameplay You are saying lets have level scaling instead of doing it the better way, which is location location location.!

We have had examples here of games that got ruined by level scaling or made worse, we have even talked about games that got very much improved by removing or lessening that level scaling by mods.
And we had plenty of examples of games that would have been MUCH worse up to totally pointless if they had level scaling.
But what we didnt hear are all those horrible games that could have been so much better if they had level scaling! Well guess what, there are none, because level scaling is a lazy game design technique that is inherently evil.

Quest for Glory 1 (aka Hero's Quest) also had level scaling. The more dangerous creatures wouldn't come out until you reached 1000 experience points. It does work better than the "location location location" you mention, mostly because it was probably tuned there.
And QTE may work nicely, see Guitar Hero (it is QTE after all), Sequence or any other "Rythm Game". I can also add "Typing of the Dead" in it, since the whole game is "Press the correct button at the correct time to proceed", aka QTE. The main difference is that those games give you a clue of what context the next keypress has instead of asking you to press a random button.

So let's try it again, we don't want lazy designs, we want balanced and well implemented ones. If one can balance and implement level scaling properly, by all means, add level scaling.

Sigh...should have known not to mention anything in comparison, because somebody will arrive to defend it, even QTEs.

Yes. You hate the medium, not the usage. So I will appear to tell you to hate the usage, not the medium. No matter what the medium is.

With that kind of word twisting you can defend anything, probably even DRM. Well you can have your QTEs,DRM and level scaling, because in the progress of appealing to the SCP (stupidest customer possible) the publishers will make extensive use of all of them in their large games.

Actually, I can't find a legit use for DRM. So DRM is something I can't defend, though depending on DRM I may not mind it (which is different).
If you do have a reason to suggest for DRM, I'd be happy to hear it. And if the reason is good enough, you may convert me. I've learnt to listen to reason and be able to be swayed, but the reason must be good, and the logic sound.

I don't, but I am sure someone has, the was the whole reason for bringing it up.

Or maybe, unlike Level Scaling and QTE, DRM doesn't have a legitimate use. Really interested in hearing the opposition, assuming one can be found.
Hm, I think I recall a few posts by Simon about using DRM to be able to transfer a digital game from one account to another, will have to go look for them.

I love QTEs when done properly. I love level scaling when done properly. I love good gameplay elements when done properly, as shocking as it might be.

For that matter, I even love DRM when done properly.

Well,that is terrifying to hear.

Nope. I flat out claim, that in some cases (certainly not all) level scaling works better then setting everything with fixed levels and that it widens the options of how to approach those games.

Nope. We had claims that this would be so, without any argument about why. I'll take your Fallout 1 example:
Again, the difficulty progression is pretty much north-south. Now go and play it the other way. Don't head towards Shady Sands, but head as far south as you can and start working your way north - start with Brotherhood / Boneyard / Cathedral or even The Glow. Is that possible, be it by quests / encounters / anything else? I admit I have no idea, haven't played it in a long time.
If it is, I'll freely admit that I've been wrong and that it's a true open world game - however, I'd still like to hear how difficult the fights around Shady Sands turn out once you reach it..... If it isn't and that's my guess, then yes it is level-walled.

With level scaling, it does have the potential to go and start where ever you wanted it to and therefor adding to replayability - simply by giving you more options. Add different factions and your view of them, depending on what you already know about them in - even more options.
Yes, I believe this has the potential to turn into a completely different game, solely depending on where you head first.

Now I'm full aware that this hasn't been truly done by other games, even 15 years after Fallout and how much more work that would have been. I'm not advocating that it should have been done so, not at all. But claiming that it would have automatically sucked? Sorry, don't see it that way.

Pick any narrowed on rails game which turned out as being either too easy or to hard.
Pick any game where you had to resort to grinding to get past that boss mob blocking you from progressing.
You still come up with none? :p