Originally Posted by
Flambard D'Quinceteth
If you're not picking a single combat skill as a dominant skill, then it's your own fault. Just because the mechanic is broken, it doesn't mean that players making bad decisions don't deserve some of the blame for their having a rough time. What skills are you picking such that you find yourself having to reduce the difficulty?
You're missing the point. Even if you pick a combat skill to level faster, if you level as soon as you're able to all the time you are probably going to get into trouble. Many players do on their first time playing, because you will be ready to level up long before you have decent modifiers for your attributes.
So I'm going to say it again, if a developer makes a stupid system with backwards incentives which can work against you if you do the obvious thing then it's their fault if the player ends up in trouble because they leveled up sub-optimally. And this is really what it comes down to. If you make a system that doesn't work the way any sane person would expect yet looks like it does work that way, any problems that fall out of that are on the game designer for doing a terrible job. There really is no sane argument you can make to push the blame for a bad system that resulting in stupidly bad results on the player.
You act as though you have to basically try and do poorly to end up severely underpowered in Oblivion, despite the fact that it happened to people like myself on our first playthroughs even though this certainly wasn't the first RPG we'd ever played. I've got plenty of experience with leveling systems from literal decades of playing games. I've seen lots of bad leveling systems, boring leveling systems, broken leveling systems, and even leveling systems which were kind of pointless. Oblivion was the first time I encountered a leveling system which did the exact opposite of what a leveling system should do unless you spend the time reading up on the intricacies of how it works. Oblivion literally punishes new players for doing the obvious thing.
You're entire rebuttal has basically been nothing but "well, it didn't happen to me so it's not a real problem. The people who had trouble just need to learn how to not make stupid decisions." This isn't a valid argument.
Edit: I think the worst thing about leveling in Oblivion though is that with some simple tweaking it could have been better. Not great mind you, but better. Just remove leveling to raise attributes and tie attribute raises to skill leveling. You can even have enemies gain levels with you still. Just tie their levels to the levels of your main combat skills so there's no way they can outpace your ability to kill them and get progressively harder unless you specifically make tougher enemies appear at higher levels. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be pretty much the same leveling system minus the possibility of new players who lack the insider knowledge to realize they're screwing themselves actually screwing themselves.