Skills

[Faldyar]

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

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

#2 Over twinked characters while leveling up always seem to get skillups in weapons and meditate in waves. IE 2-5 skillups then none for a while then almost always the same number more before none again.

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.

Furthermore I am willing to take this one step further. Lets take the Green Metal Camp in SSRA, I'd be willing to be anything that it is also time based, not rare spawn based. If you can clear mines you get 1 per 20ish rares, if you cant you get 1 per a lot lower number.

Faldyar
65th Level Enchanter
Test Server

[Hibashira]

Would that not require the server to keep a timer or whatnot for every single skill every single character that's online? That's very severe load on the servers. Let's say there are 30 skills (weapons, spells, language, and trade), 30 timer per character, average 500(?) players online, that's 15,000 timers process?!?!

I'd have to disagree with this one.

[Hobbun]

Re: Skills

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

#1 Firona Via 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?


Hobbun

[andyhre]

Maybe I am missing something, but I think the reason you see skills ups on melee and meditate in waves of 5 is that your cap is based on your level. So when you are at level 19, your cap is 100, and then as soon as you hit 20, the cap jumps to 105. So every time you fight (or meditate), you suddenly can go up in skill again, until you hit 105. Then it hits the cap again and you don't see any improvements until you hit level 21, where it can quickly jump up to 110.

More interesting is when you suddenly get a new skill, like when double attack kicks in or some such. I suspect you see a bumpy progression upwards, but nothing like the stop/start of your offense skill.

As for languages, je ne c'est pas.

edited a typo which made my numbers make a little less sense.

[Obina]

Interesting possibility. Makes you think. Thanks for sharing. Agree with Hibashira however this is unlikely. It does not really require that many separate timers - just record the /played time, and compare current versus this value. But it would be a bunch of data points to track. Why would Verant go to all that trouble?

It is easier if it is just something like like a one in 30 chance to skill up on a RNG. This could be for a 250 Wis/Int toon from skill 249 to 250, and there is a simple fiddle for lower Wis/Int and for different skill levels.

The streaks come from random numbers. In fact it would be unlikely not to get streaks of "no result" for an event that is 1 in 30. Even for, say, flipping a coin, streaks of lots of heads happen all the time.

[Silound]

Didn't at conception they state that there is code in place to discourage large runs of tradeskills to skill fast? I thought I heard that somewhere before. Anyway, that's not a bad idea, but I tried after reading this. made simple mule, erudite wizard. Maxed int fast with KEI and twink gear. Proceeded to do brewing till ~122 (or whenever that grub and water mix trivs at). Result? 15 mins of carpal tunnel and I had trivialed that mixture. So either there are some exceptions to the rule or perhaps depending on skill as to how many skillups you can have in a certain amount of time. Will test further to see for myself if it has any relation.
But to have variations or exceptions like that would mean you need a proportional mathematical equation (or two if its reasonable to split it 0-100 and 101-250, but that would assume its all function called), otherwise that bogs code down trying to filter through so many conditional statements.
With any other skill (save languages) your max is always ((5 * yourlvl)+5)=max. IE, if I am lvl 21, my max is ((5 * 21)+5)=110 max. check it, its completely true, just in a simplified version of what a lot foofeople try to use.

Silound
Minstrel of Prexus

[Faldyar]

The Timers only have to be started after you skill up sucessfully and go away after the time period passes. Next on weapons, your overtwink level 30 warrior when he dings has all his weapon skills go up 5 levels but he generally gets about 4-5 skillups almost immedately (offense/defense/dodge/parry/weapon) and then a long pause before any of em go up again. So offense might go up 2.. and defense 1 parry1 and the weapon 1. These timers definately are shorter the lower your skill level.

Faldyar
65th Enchanter
Test server

[Hibashira]

Starting and terminating processes are expensive in terms of computer resources, it would be way inefficient to code timers this way. I played many classes and I have never observed this, let's give it a name, Faldyar's Timer Effect.

Weapon and Offense is related to the actual swing, that much is certain so it would be natural that they go up faster than defense and parry, for example. How the defense skill is checked is not entirely obvious. Parry definitely won't do skill up check unless it passes the Parry check itself.

Unless there are some hard data to support this, FTE can only be a hypothesis.

[calidorn2]

Here is my theory on skill ups.

Several assumptions I use ;
Every time you do a non trivial combine you spin the RNG.
Every point has an assigned value that the RNG must beat to allow a skillup.
Factors such as Wis/Int/Str/Dex give you a value that is added to the RNG number.
Doing a combine within a certain range of your current skill gives you a greater chance of success, and a success gives you a bonus.

Lets have an example ( I stress this is all total guesswork and values are made up.)

Tailoring

Current skill 240
Attempting an item trivial 250
Value needed for skillup 200
RNG rolls 183
Int/dex/str/wis value - bonus - 9
Successful combine - bonus 2

Total points 194

Result - No skillup.

Very simple. No real work for the server with timers and things. Certainly no harder than calculating a melee hit/miss every swing. The hell levels are because some points have a very high value you need to beat.

The RNG is streaky (just do numerous /random 100 and see for yourself)

To Faldyar.
You comment that melee skillups are faster at lower levels. Generally you are correct. This has nothing to do with what you think it does. It has everything to do with the level of the mob compared to your own level. At lower levels you are more likely to be fighting even and yellow cons. Sometimes even red cons. The higher the level mob you are meleeing the greater the chance of a skillup. At high levels you are more likely to be meleeing lower dark blue cons hence the slower skillup rate. Bash greenies at 50 and you will literally never see a skillup. The so called streaks of varied skills you mention are more a factor of the mobs lvl and a good run on the RNG.

[Calliopeia]

Language Skillup Timer

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?


Hobbun

I think I can explain this misconception. You can teach yourself languages by going to the trainer and investing one point, and then grouping with someone else and spamming group chat. If you are teaching yourself a language by grouping, I believe you can only get one point per half hour per zone. Once you zone, you can get another point regardless of how much time has passed. This is a very nice method of learning orcish if you need to quest the Torment xp only key.

[Taushar]

Re: Language Skillup Timer

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?


Hobbun

I think I can explain this misconception. You can teach yourself languages by going to the trainer and investing one point, and then grouping with someone else and spamming group chat. If you are teaching yourself a language by grouping, I believe you can only get one point per half hour per zone. Once you zone, you can get another point regardless of how much time has passed. This is a very nice method of learning orcish if you need to quest the Torment xp only key.

Hmm, are you talking this is the case in all servers or just FV server? I have run and attended many language faires and I don't find this is to be the case.

First of all, they fixed so that you don't have to zone to see where your skills are. It used to be you had to zone to see where you were on skills because they never updated it.

Second of all, like everything else high wis/int helps on learning a language. This is definitely true from personal experience.

Lastly, here is my experience on learning a language with a partner. If I get 1 point on any language, I can spam until my partner goes to 2. Then he/she spams until I get to 3. Then I do until he/she gets to 4 etc. etc. You can master any languages this way between two people, you can only teach other person 1 point above yours. I never had to zone to get another point in the past, only to see where my skill was. I am pretty sure we were able to spam each other constantly and was able to get a skill up within 30 sec or less without having to zone.

Taushar

[andyhre]

oops. This was meant for a different thread. My apologies.

[Quesci]

The language restriction was on the Firiona Vie server. On that server (which is flagged as the Roleplay Server), characters start out only knowing their own racial language. In order to group with people of other races--and understand what they were saying--you had to learn their language. Since in the current system, language learning is a fairly trivial thing, they restricted it to 1 point per 30 minutes per language.

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.

[borblefoot furtoe]

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


Incorrect.

The original rule restriction on FV was 1 point per RL hour playing time. The timer was reset whenever you zoned, however. This restriction along with many others was removed over a year ago in the May 8th patch.


Borblefoot Furtoe
56th season Druid
Firiona Vie Server

[Gargazon]

This isn't a bad idea really, it would make perfect sense to me, and further confirm a suspicion of mine that part of tradeskilling occurs client side and part server side. It would explain the thing with lag causing more failures/fewer skillups for sure. So if the skillups are done client side, and confirmed server side, and the successes were done server side, and confirmed client side, or vice versa, it could provide the reason why. I'll admitt though that I am not a programmer, so I have no idea how it works as I don't know how to decompile and read the code.