Originally posted by Moraganth
Ultimately to test this, all anyone needs to do is a bunch of combines.. and record the number of combines, failures, successes, and wether the skillups came on failure or success.
Ultimately to test this, all anyone needs to do is a bunch of combines.. and record the number of combines, failures, successes, and wether the skillups came on failure or success.
Consider JC. If you use Gumkak's guide, you'll always be making something very close to trivial, and fails will be quite low. The vast majority of your skillups will come on successes merely because you will have far more successes then fails.
Now consider brewing. The common advice for getting started in brewing is to jump directly into Fetid Essence, which is trivial 122. In the first half of your combines, you'll have very few successes indeed, but you'll still be gaining skillups -- in other words, the majority of your skillups would be on fails. The same would apply to baking if you jump directly into Fish Rolls, then on to Patty Melts.
On the other hand, both baking and brewing have a number of interim recipes you could try, which would raise your success rate and hence, your rate of skillups on success. Likewise, with JC, you could just pick a particular combine and always make that, assuming cost is not an issue. That would likely reduce your success rate.
This is the main reason folks say that the testing environment has to be controlled. If we standardize on one toon with particular stats, who does only certain combines in a certain order, we eliminate the variables. This would allow us to focus on the data.
Side note: I've mentioned this before in other threads, but I think it got overlooked. All the test suggestions I've seen say to create a toon and skill it up from zero to X. This does get us some data to work with, but no one has yet checked whether any conclusions derived from this data are applicable to the higher end of tradeskills, particularly the so-called hell levels. It's been repeatedly established that the number of combines per skillup increases rather dramatically as you get past 190 or so. As we gather data from the low-end tests, we have to remember to keep testing the higher-end too, to see whether our conclusions hold across the board.
Comment