This came up in the voice chat during the AMA yesterday. Sort of related to skill grind, there are some skills where, when you fail, it's almost always catastrophic at low levels.
There are other skills, like ride, where it's less punishing at low levels and there are multiple levels of failure. Your mount might try to veer toward something and you get an echo, or you might not move at all. Sometimes you fall off, but that doesn't usually happen when you're just trying to learn how to ride. You skin some things, and maybe you don't get the good stuff, but at least you get a slab of meat.
It would be nice if there were multiple, noncatastrophic ways to fail some skills. The ones that immediately come to mind for me are climb (falling off all the time) or bandage (destroying wounds). I feel like if you're climbing with both hands free, you might not be able to get up another level, but you shouldn't just fall off. If you're trying to bandage someone, you might not be able to get that bandage on (or you think you have but ha ha ha you haven't). It would be nice if the catastrophic fails were just that. Critical failures.
I'm sure there are other skills, but those are the two that come to mind for me.
Edit by Halaster: removed some accidental IC info that probably shouldn't be there.
There are level of failures that I know of. I'm not sure I can talk about coded specifics but, they are there.