Idk if someone from Bethesda said this or if it was just a Youtuber regarding the stupid ways to level up in Oblivion (like jumping around for hours), but: If that‘s how people enjoy playing the game, then let them. And I agree with this.

Regarding abuse of game mechanics and not just bugs/glitches… I can only think of some Dark Souls bosses that can be baited into killing themselves by fall damage. For some it‘s clearly intentional (Iron Guard thing in Dark Souls 1), for some arguable (Dark Souls 2 the guy in the sunken area), and some clearly rather unintended (first real boss in Dark Souls 1 for example, it‘s really hard to do and when it happens the dude drops like a rocket lol)

Ah yes, the Eldritch guides to the secrets of the Elder Scrolls universe

A friend used to spend time sneaking + auto walking into a door behind which was an npc. He did that to level up the sneaking skill... Edit: oh, op mentioned his trick as well. Still, point stands.

Meh.. these types of tricks are interesting to discover, but boring to use, imo. If you're gonna play that way imo just use cheats to max whatever skills you want. Less time wasted and more time left to enjoy the game.

Skyrim's followers have a maximum carry weight and won't let you trade them any items after they exceed it. That is, if you TRADE them the items! You can just Hold E/talk to them and go into interaction mode and order them to pick up things from the ground. They will happily do so without complains regardless of their carry weight status, extremely helpful for collecting a bunch of dwemer junk to smelt down into ingots for smithing - those things are heavy!

In morrowind, you would gain athletics experience for swimming, even if you weren't moving. So an easy way to powerlevel was to jump into a canal in balmora, wrap a rubber band around your controller stick, and walk away for a few hours whole your character endlessly swam into a wall leveling up.

I know there were also several broken spell combinations, but my favorite was using a custom fortify jump 100 for 3 seconds and then a fortify jump 200 for 1 second and leaping across the map (because fast travel was transit style between fixed points).

Oh and summons disappear when they die, but if you looted one the same instant you killed it, you could get its gear. So you could create a cheap summon golden saint spell for a few seconds, kill and loot it and repeat for unlimited ebony and glass shields and weapons.

In skyrim, there are enchantments that enhance alchemy, and potions that enhance enchanting, so by alternating between the two, you could create gear with RIDICULOUS enchantments. Like the numbers on them would be in the hundreds of thousands.

Weakness to Magic stacks exponentially with itself when it comes from 2 different spells.

For example, lets say you have 2 spells with Weakness to Magic 100% for 6 seconds: Spell 1, and Spell 2.

Spell 1: target becomes 100% weak to magic
Spell 2: target becomes 2 * 100% = 200% weak to magic
recast Spell 1: target becomes 2 * 200% = 400% weak to magic
recast Spell 2: target becomes 2 * 400% = 800% weak to magic

And so on. After a few stacks of that debuff, and you can 1-hit-kill any foe with a spell that deals damage.

Weakness to Magic also works on the player character and it will amplify the effect of buffs. Stacking it before casting your buff spells lets you walk around with millions of health, stamina, and mana for short periods of time.