Tropes are bad if you join the Thieves Guild because you want to do some thieving, and the entire main quest of the faction has nothing to do with thieving, and everything about the Thieves’ Guild being run by complete suckers.
Then either don’t put in a magical key that unlocks every door, or accept that it is a game breaker and let the player have their fun.
What Grumman said.
But the big issue here is not that one aspect of it didn’t work. As he points out, had the questline overall been effective a few nitpicks would be easily glossed over. The problem is that every single quest in the entire Thieves’ Guild chain is illogical and/or requires huge amounts of fanwank to justify. As the player, I should never ever be in the situation where I’m supposed to make things sensible for the author. It’s the authors job to make all the events in the story, at the least, seem plausible.
The problem is that the Thieve’s Guild storyline doesn’t do this. IN Oblivion and Morrowind, you sought out the Thieves and proved yourself. No matter what you might look like, you were giving them a reason to trust you. But in Skyrim, they just walk up and ask you to join, even if you’re famous for killing every criminal you spot. Even if you’re a huge thug with the pickpocket ability of a blind leper in delirium tremens. And it actually gets worse from there. At no point does anybody’s actions make sense. The only way to make it seem decent is to mentally rewrite the plot on the fly. (I personally decided that Karliah murdered Gallus, and the diary was a fake she created to weasel her way back into the guild after blowing her loot over twenty years. Mercer was just trying to keep the Guild’s spirits up by telling them that they stilled had a room of treasure and was going to make good on that promise by stealing the Eyes.)
Now, if your argument is the story “doesn’t matter”, then there’s no much to talk about and they might have as well have dropped it and just had generic NPC’s handing you random missions.
Right, but if you are writing about how much Prometheus’s plot sucked, don’t address that but then spend half the time criticizing the font used to write the title and talking about how actor B would’ve done better in a role. You might as well worry about why all these artifacts are mysteriously available for the PC, when they’re literally one of a kind Daedrichood of the Traveling Pants artifacts (I am aware of the lore that says Daedra, especially the dickish ones, [del]Indian give[/del] Ashlander give a hero’s artifact right when s/he needs it most).
In Oblivion it was worse. It gave a +40 to lockpicking, which meant that if your base skill was 60+, you couldn’t level it anymore (without some minor exploits). And TES is of course a game series where your level is dependent on your skill level instead of vice versa.
In both games I tossed it pretty quick, as lockpicks are hardly rare and it was more fun to do it right. Morrowind had the opposite problem: I never touched it because it has limited uses, and even though I’d not eat them all in one playthrough (and have console commands besides), I didn’t want to waste one.
I was playing Skyrim just yesterday as my newish female Redguard, and I came across a Khajiit trading caravan. The salesperson complained that Khajiit aren’t trusted, and have to stay outside the city gates. And then she sold me 35(!) lockpicks.
Well, this is hilarious :D. After all this is why we still love the game.