Skills

[Antoin]

Re: Skills

I have a supposition about the way Skills work. First I'll list 2 known and accepted facts.

#1 Firona Via(sic) server when it first opened allowed 1 skillup per 30 minutes of play in any language skill.

I have not heard of any server having any limit on skill ups in a certain time frame. I don't know, I could be totally wrong and I missed it...but has anyone else heard this?

I haven't just heard this, I've experienced it. 1 language skill up per 60 RL minutes (some reports said 45 minutes, one EQ day) or per zone. Not one skillup per language, one skillup period.

Of course, when it came out, it also capped the skill you could learn from listening to 5. (Real fun for my dark elf friend that came to Paineel. He dumped 25 points into human and we still had to repeat what we said.)

This was removed, and now languages work normally (beyond changing what races start with.) You could still learn languages faster through training points.

I was not aware that this restriction was removed. It is not listed on the EQLive page describing the special rule sets. That page is fairly old--it states that only one character per account can be on the FV server, whereas the limit was increased to two when Luclin came out.

The restriction has been removed; the only thing that is still there is the fact that common is not common (it's called human) and that everyone only starts with their primary racial languages. A wood elf ONLY knows elvish at level 1; a dark elf ONLY knows dark elvish. An iksar ONLY knows lizardman. Vah Shir know Combine and Vah Shir, though.

Those of human descent know common/human; Half-elves, erudites, barbarians, humans. Half elves also know elvish; it is one of their advantages there speaking 2 of the 3 most-used tongues (#3 is Dark Elvish, if you want some trivia)

As for the 2-character thing, that is somewhat incorrect. This was allowed for a short period of time; it was a bug. Some people do have more than one character--many of us refer to it grudgingly as the "blue for a day" patch.

Attempting to make a second character at the present time on FV will fail.

[Quesci]

Re: Skills

As for the 2-character thing, that is somewhat incorrect. This was allowed for a short period of time; it was a bug. Some people do have more than one character--many of us refer to it grudgingly as the "blue for a day" patch.

Attempting to make a second character at the present time on FV will fail.

I have already been shown to be wrong plenty of times, so it won't surprise me if I am wrong again, but are you SURE it was a bug? I really recall a patch message saying that they wanted FV players to be able to experience the new Vah Shir race when Luclin came out and were making a second character slot available.

Of course, if you can only create one character there now, they must have taken it away, suggesting that it was indeed a bug. But darned if I don't clearly remember them saying that it was deliberate. Humph, old timers disease I guess.

[Taraddar]

Re: Skills

My supposition is this. The skillup generator is not at all streaky. It is instead controlled not by randomness but by time. Once your skillups in a given time frame exceed a certain number your chances of success go way way down. I'd be willing to bet anything that those huge runs of no skillups in all the logs occur after a skillup and in the next 30minutes of real time. This fits verants vision(tm) more than pure random. You must put in the time to get the skill. Thus its better to do 10 combines a day for 20 days then 300 combines in 20minutes.

You looking for patterns in realatively random results. The fact that you think you are finding results isn't suprising really. Random means just that. Flip a coin 500 times and you should end up with 250/250 head verses tails or something fairly close to it. This of corse doesn't mean that it will alternate head and then tails the entire time. Quite the opposite. You are likely to see runs of heads and runs of tails at different points in time but accross the whole thing you should seea fairly even distribution of heads and tails.

My tradesklling experience tells me that it couldn't be a hard cap like the languages where on FV. Why just this morning before heading to work I was pouring pp into fletching and got 7 or 8 skill ups inless than an hour and at least one situation 2 skill ups came in the same batch of 10 combines, and from what I recall off the top of my head with in 2 or 3 combines of each other, which would put them with in a minute or 2 of each other. This is in the low 200's range so this isn't a case of my skill just being low either. I remember the same types of situations when I was skilling up in tailoring too. Off hand I know of at least one time when I get 3 skill ups in 20 combines in the mid 190's in tailoring which would once again be in a matter of a couple of minutes of each other.\

Having done probably 3000+ points of tradeskills (nearing 1950 on my main as a shaman, have an enchanter twink with 250jc and his 8th shawl so most other skills near 200 and my druid with 250 brewing and a couple other trade skills) in my in eq I haven't seen anything to indicate to me that there is anything outside of a random chance at a skill up every time you hit combine. I beleive it's something like what calidorn2 describes to determine if you get a skill up or not but over all it's just random.

At one point back when I was working on my shawl for my shaman I needed to get my pottery up. I don't have the number in front of me since i'm at work but I litterally got a skill up almost every combine at first. It was something like 38 skill ups out of rhte first 40 combines and then like 50 out of the first 60 combines. This was back before they made pottery skill ups harder and was as lvl 60 with 255 wis doing very low pottery but the skill up rate was rediculously fast.

Yeah sometimes it can seem like something like that is occuring but it's just random. It sure felt like it the first time I did fletcing. Who know how many combines and 4k plat down the drain and only 1 skill up at the start but I went back this morning and did some more combines and got 7 pr 8 skill ups and about 5k spent.

[Zukobim]

It would explain the thing with lag causing more failures/fewer skillups for sure.

SOE would never allow such things to be decided on the client, because its open to hacking then.

As a programmer, I know that fewer actions normally means faster execution of the code, so I guess the server only do a random roll now and then and not for all your actions, so in like 1 second all checks done will be compared to that roll, then a new roll is done and all checks will now be compared to that roll.
If you got lag, then your packets would be delayed and in many cases be delivered to the server at nearly the same time, so they might all be checked against the same roll.
To make a true RNG you need a fairly advanced code, but the, at all times, changing lag on the internet is an excellent random generator.
A few other data can be used to make it even more random without using the RNG code directly, like the number of the packets you are sending to the server. It will be made random with all the other movements, spam and actions that are occuring in the zone and chat channels.

Lastly I would say that most humans can not understand how a RNG works.
Humans have a tendency to spread events evenly out over the spectrum, while in reality its not so spread at all.
Roll a dice 20 times and you might not get 6 at any roll.
Roll the dice 2000 times and it will start to be more evened out, but you might still see some heavy overwieght n one of the numbers.