My weight painting only works at 100% no matter the shade I am trying to weight paint using blender 2.73a, but no matter what weight I assign to a vertex or what shade the weight painting is it always gets influenced 100% by the armature/bone.

Has anyone else had this problem?

I add this picture of a cylinder and one bone. As can seen the weight paint is not uniform, but the entire cylinder follows the bone.



Or am I totally not understanding weight paint.

I also add a link to the blend file below:
blend file of cylinder with bone
This is how weights work.

The weight doesn't define an influence of a particular bone; It describes the Mix factor of influence between multiple bones.

So a vertex with 1% weight on one bone and 0% on all other bones will be 100% influenced by the 1% bone.
A vertex with 1% weight on one bone and 50% weight on another bone will be almost entirely controlled by the 50% bone.

In other words, a vertex is always influenced 100%. Weight only controls which bones do the influencing.



To get a result similar to what I think you are expecting, add a second bone weighted to all the vertices by 100%. Now the first bone's weights will cause non-uniform influences, as you might expect.