Just thought that I'd point out a few things.
If anyone is making a new character, I would suggest that they take at least one skill for each stat in primary and secondary, since otherwise I don't think you can raise them. I don't think there is a level cap, because after 20 the phrase just duplicates. My Willpower, Intelligence, Strength and Endurance are close to max (playing a Fighter/Mage) but I've got no way (cept through spells) of raising my other stats.
If you want to sell expensive items without a plugin, then a decent way of doing it is to train with a person for a bit and then sell an item...after a while it defaults back to their original cash reserve, so watch out, but you can normally at least double the amount of money they've got, so it's handy when selling basic glass/daedric items if you sell it to the right people.
Depending on how people are playing the game thes last two points may or may not be useful.
You can max both athletics and sneak by finding a wall and jamming the relevant keys down and then leaving the game running.
With regards to spells if you want to improve a spell then you can create one of very low cost and then recast it lots of times, since for some utterly stupid reason low cost spells raise your skill as much as high cost spells do, even when some high cost spells are absolutely impossible to cast. I'm trying to role play my character, so I haven't done the ath/sneak trick, but I've ended up making a fairly crap attack spell and using it on enemies to raise my Destruction magic, because otherwise it's just really hard to get it up to a decent level as around level 60 I'm using spells which may/may not cast, and gobble at least 1/5th of my mana!! I found a good amount to spend was about 5 mana points per cast.
Anyway, hope some of these things help. My conclusion of the game is that Bethesda have created a spectacular world, and I actually quite enjoy the combat, but the AI in places is frustrating (I've seen people charge continually into a wall if they've got to use a ladder to reach me). The world also seems quite barren - every so often there are random people in the middle of no where for no reason, but no real variety on top of that - would have been cool to find a camp of people all slaughtered for example, or meet other wandering adventurers or groups of adventurers. Similar the monsters seem pretty repetitive. I spend a lot of my time in the wilderness (because my computer can't handle towns
) and I seem to walk for about 20 minutes trying to get over mountains and getting hit by a big bird thing every now and then.
The quests are good fun, and the dungeons are well designed this time (as opposed to the ones in the second game which were ridiculous!!), plus I haven't had any problems with crashing which by that sounds of it is the biggest complaint.
Anyway, I reckon that this game will mod very well. There's already a hell of a lot of support for it, and I reckon Bethesda have made a great template to work on. Overall I reckon it's excellent
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Ahh yeah, I guess most people have found this by now, but Soultrap is a ridiculously easy way of making money. If you're not playing a mage character I suggest just joining the guild, buying soultrap and getting an item with some charges in like a ring. You can get a 60k Soulgem for the item on (I think) the second Balmora Mage mission when you have to place a fake soulgem on someone's desk.
