[cjhveal]

You're honestly not doing anything wrong. Morrowind is a really unsatisfying game for a lot of reasons. The RNG based combat mechanics feel off in a game that lets you aim your strikes. The quests are difficult to follow, offering vague and often incorrect directions for long cross-country treks where you're constantly attacked by annoying flying creatures. Getting the most out of character advancement encourages you to play in a restrictive way.

Morrowind really shines when you're able to work past all that immerse yourself in the world anyway. Without spoiling too much, you're released from prison without much skill or equipment into a fractured society, full of political and racial tension. It's up to you to explore and navigate your way through things and the world is rich enough to (usually) support your investigation. The story leans into typical tropes about the "chosen one" and power creep in a way that makes it compatible with using a little meta-gaming knowledge and min-maxing while roleplaying. After a little artifact hunting and enchanting you're soon able to breathe underwater, levitate at will, instantly kill everything in a 50 foot radius, or jump vast distances across the continent and land gracefully. All of which would feel pretty cheesy if it weren't set on an island ruled by three individuals who have amassed enough arcane power to be called gods.

Speaking for myself personally, Morrowind is one of those games played as much in the theater of one's mind as it is on the computer screen. As others mentioned, mods help a lot to make the game more visually immersive and iron out some of its rough edges. But ultimately what appealed to me about Morrowind is weaving my own story into the setting, climbing that power curve from nearly powerless to god-like.

[m12k]

About min-maxing: Teenage-me made the mistake of discovering that the vendor economy in Morrowind is fundamentally broken. Basically, the base price that vendors will buy and sell something for goes down when they like you more and up when they like you less. There's also a spread affected by this too, which should compensate for that, but if you max out the mercantile skill, then that spread is narrowed enough that you can buy something for cheap, make the vendor like you less, and then sell back the same thing at a profit due to the now increased base price. Luckily, making a highball sell offer offends the vendor in a way that will make them dislike you, but only for as long as the current conversation lasts. This means if you first bribe vendors to max out their affection toward you, then after that it's possible to buy their whole stock for cheap, temporarily offend them to increase their prices, then sell them everything back at a profit, end the conversation, then rinse and repeat. This way you can farm the vendors for all their gold.

You have to wait a while for the vendors' inventory and gold reserves to reset - luckily one thing you can use all that gold for is paying trainers to improve your skills, after which you'll be able to level up if you sleep (handily resetting the vendors). With the right trainers, it's possible to always improve enough major and minor skills together before sleeping, that you power level, gaining the maximum stats per level.

The first real city you get to, Balmora, has trainers that cover every single skill I cared about (maybe all of them?) and enough vendors to supply you with plenty of gold to pay the trainers. I made a "circuit" of the city, where I would run around farming vendors and paying trainers, then sleeping to level up. After doing this for a couple hours, I'd already leveled up more than the game expected me to do at all - enemies didn't seem to scale all the way up there that well, and because I'd consistently powerleveled, my stats were super high too. I still completed the game, but it wasn't all that challenging, felt more like a sandbox to play god in.

[Tuna-Fish]

That's nowhere near the worst exploit in Morrowind. Potions let you temporarily improve stats, which lets you make better potions. You can very rapidly make this spiral into godlike power, very early on in the game.

[iamacyborg]

Morrowind didn’t have much, if any, enemy scaling. Which is fun when you’re at low levels and trying to avoid caves full of high level enemies but can make things dull if you power level.

[PrimeDirective]

I did try to bribe the traders and get on their good side, but they always had

1. goods I didn't want

2. not enough money to buy my stuff

3. bad prices

Yeah, I didn't really enjoy that mechanic where you get on their good side, don't like it in real life either and I think that's what stopped me from maxing those skills.

I did, however, find a scamp in Caldera who would buy anything with a fixed original price and didn't require any flattery. He also had 5000 gold and when you maxed it out, you just waited for 24h