I think that expecting people to not max out certain skills as much as possible is a bit naive. If you want to be a thief, you'll work on picking locks, picking pockets and sneaking, but picking pockets raises waaaay faster than the other two, so you'll end up being level 100 in skill and level 20+ in general after just a few hours.

And the reason you need to work on those skills, is because using them "in the field" doesn't raise them enough. After 20 hours or so, my sneaking is still just 55 and I'm sneaking ALL THE TIME! Every kill I make is a sneak kill so how on earth can I only be at level 55? I pick every lock as well and I'm just level 50 either and I've picked hundreds and hundreds of locks. Sure, I'm surviving without them being level 100, but as a thief you want to sneak as well as possible and even at level 55, you're easily spotted.

In general, I'd say the game needs to be rebalanced - some skills need to be modded to make more sense, to be more or less rewarding, or to level up fast enough compared to how you explore the game. It's just not quite there.

I always find the easiest way to make money, and picking pockets really makes a killing - go to Riften, do one quest, and you have a fence that gets fresh money every day so it's highly rewarding to steal from then on.

Then I found a second method that's even easier: enchant the loot from caves and stuff using soulgems and sell them or, even better, do the Azura quest and get Azura's star (i recommend getting the black star) and you can easily make very powerful weapons and sell them for 500+ gold each. Then with the money, you can easily BUY the skills from any trainer you encounter.

I failed to understand the power of spell wards, try them and let them waste their mana on you. You should always cary a weapon that drains magicka too, so when fighting mages you;

-Hide behind columns
-walk towards enemy with ward up
-hit him a few times with drain magicka weapon
-repeat

As others said, 50 seems to be the soft cap with only the insanely dedicated getting further. I am sure I could have leveled to 50+ if I did the other questlines, but I wanted to do them with a new character.

I saw most there was to see with swords and destruction magic anyway, so no big.

Another justification for the level scaling, at least as far as enemies are concerned, would be that you can't really call it an "open world" RPG anymore if there's a soft linearity enforced by difficulty.

To some those are arguments against leveled encounters, to others they are arguments for the same.

Yeah, there has to be some scaling. And by the way, saying you can finish this game without leveling at all is incorrect. There are many enemies in the world right when you start that are too difficult to beat at level one, and some of them will be along the main quest route. Hagravens for example... try beating one of those right out of the tutorial and you're a dead man.

The newest 'patch' is just more DRM. Now Steamworks has been added to the main exe.

Nice to see where their priorities are.

Yeah, and now some folks are seeing increased crashing [again]. Some of us were able to bypass crashing by using the LAA utility [Large Address Aware enabler for 4GB+ memory access], but the update puts a stop to that.

Ah well, was only a matter of time before something stupid happened eh? I am not an opponent of DRM, but I dislike when it affects my ability to play [or, in Skyrim's case - play for a period of time without crashing] legitimate copies of games :/

The more screwing Steam does to paying customers the more of them will revolt. I like it.

I had Steam turned off and was playing direct from the exe anyway, so I avoided the replacement. I will have to deal with it when a real patch comes though, I guess.

So in other words, it's yet another way to take away player freedom. Lovely.

Ugh! Just like Oblivion then. Definitely not getting it.

As someone else said, scaling is required for player freedom to some extent. If you place everything and make regions varying levels of difficulty then the exploration is all completely linear as you go from one level area to another, like WoW.

The problem with Oblivion was that it over did it. Skyrim is not nearly as bad. You can find high-level items early on if you know where to look. You can stumble on really tough enemies if you go to the right area.