Proving 'Success have a greater chance of giving a skillup'

[Vulcon Mastercrafter]

Another cheap way would be minator hero's brew till skill 100 (close to 100% fail rate) Vs following the trivials in order. With two identical toons.

[andyhre]

Well, I think that would leave the question -- did the people who followed close to trivials do better b/c they suceeded more (which they will) or because they were closer to the trivial.

if there are no identical trivials for no-fail and fail combines, perhaps another way to break these effects up would be to take identical mid-level tradeskilled items (making the experiment much harder/more costly) and equi one with a success enhancer. I think there are some skills where you can get a +15% success item. At 100 level skill, that 15% boost will matter a great deal and should allow for seeing if there is a difference. If this is repeated enough, in pairs of identical characters, clearly the one with the item will succeed more. Will it skill up faster? If so, it's fairly compelling that it is success that drives, not proximity to trivial, since that will be the same. If not, despite more successes, it would seem to offer strong evidence against.

This has the added benefit of holding everything else (except the timing of the NG) equal -- same characters, same recipes, same wis/int, etc.

Unfortunately, i don;t think you can do this with low level characters b/c the +15% thingamabob won;t be noticeable at overly low skill levels.

[Ruatha]

Having read this thread through in its entirety, I would like to say that I am now convinced.

[DeegerStormcrow]

I think doing the no-fail combines is brilliant. Someone (else ) should do this.

[andyhre]

If someone helps me identify the failable and non-failable combines with equiv trivs, I will volunteer to do a sizable number of combines both ways.

[Tildy]

nm.

[Troodon]

Zararazu,

You are wrong. Zera did a good job of accounting for the fact that the chances of success and failure were different for different recipies at different skills. The most telling way she did this was when she compared the rate of skillups on the combines that were successful compared to the rate of skillups on the combines that were failures.

Your point would be valid if she were only counting total numbers of skillups. However, she is comparing rate of skillups using recipes that yielded a pretty good mixture of failures and successes. When she says that on average successful combines yielded skillups around 40% of the time while unsuccessful combines yielded skillups only 19% of the time she is not simply counting successes.

If you were zealous about wanting to remove 'chance to succeed' as a variable you could repeat the experiment using Mino Hero Brews, which would yield a 5% success rate for the entire experiment, but that would only yield a marginal improvement.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 60th Campaign
E'ci – Destiny Awaits

Well don't know how to explain it any better. But I've seen no conclusive evidence one way or the other that proves (or disproves, for the matter) that there is any correlation between success and skilling up. I'm of the mind to disbelieve such a correlation until I see conclusive evidence to the contrary. And despite how thorough some of these experiments are, they simply neither prove nor disprove such a correlation; they're all conducted assuming the correlation exists. Can't explain this any better than I already have, if you don't accept my reasoning, oh well.

All I know is that in all my tradeskilling I've seen no difference in skillup rates based on how high the trivial was for any given recipe. Based on my own experience there seems to be little, if any, correlation between chance of success (or the event of success) and chance of skill ups, and until I seem conclusive evidence to the contrary will continue to believe that the two events have no correlation.

And the MHB experiment would be a MAJOR improvement, hehe. If chance of success were fixed it would make any data on such an experiment actually mean something. Even better method would be to try experiment and various chances of success to see if it was affecting chance of skillup. It's quite possible that the chance of success is what's affecting skillup rate rahter than the actual event of success (doubt this, but it's possible).

Anyone tried simply asking the game designers? They're the ones that made the tradeskill system in the first place, and would certaintly know how the system was designed. Rare comments that made on such seemed to imply that stats (wis, int, str, dex, depending on tradeskill) were the only determining factor in chance of skillup, and current skill is only determining factor in chance of success. Not sure if they've said anything explicitly that confirms or refutes the theory that skillup is more likely to happen on success or failure though. Likely not, they seem not to want to give out too many specifics for fear of revealing "spoiler" information.