Experience Spillage

[Latrinsorm]

This came up awhile ago, but I don't feel like searching for the thread.

Each player character has an experience "bucket"; a limited amount of unabsorbed experience he or she can store. If this bucket has unabsorbed experience in it when more experience is gained (for instance from searching a killed creature), the player character will generally not gain as much experience as he or she would have if his or her bucket had been empty.

I think I know how the math works.

If a given act is worth x experience, the player character will gain:
trunc((1 - .05*trunc(unabsorbed experience / 100)) * x)

Thus, if the player character has less than 100 unabsorbed experience (before the gain), he or she will gain the full value of unabsorbed experience.

I'm 100% positive this is how it works up to 298 experience. Maybe after I get done with midterms I'll do more work on this, but I doubt it. Generally a player character has a bucket of about 1000 experience, meaning he or she will only get about half-experience when near fried. This raises an interesting (to me, anyway) question: Is it really best to hunt until fried, especially given that the difference in absorption between fried and numbed is quite small? To figure that out, I suppose I'd need to know the exact % values of fried, numbed, etc. are.

Artha, the check's in the mail.

[Celephais]

What I am more curious about is how this affects exp from bounty tasks, that is if it does.

[Ignot]

So what your thinking of hunting until numbed instead of fried? I think its marginable at best.

[Celephais]

More that if you are numb, it's not worth taking the 2/3rd exp absorbtion rate for being out of town to get the last few kills for fried.

As for my question, I want to know if it's worth waiting till you're say clearish to turn in a bounty instead of just doing it at fried (that is if it is 50% the exp if you do it at fried)

[Latrinsorm]

So what your thinking of hunting until numbed instead of fried? I think its marginable at best.I was, and I agree. The best-case scenario for leaving at numbed is in slow-gen hunting areas: hanging around for a minute to find a creature and kill it will only net 55ish for like-level minus 18ish for absorption is a net of 37. Getting back on a node for that pulse won't net 37. The farther a person underhunts, though, the less and less conclusively better hunting until fried becomes.

I don't know how it affects bounties, but I did happen to confirm that 3xx experience is mapped correctly by the formula I stated in my first post with my empath. I'll try to do a bounty with her sometime and see how it goes.

[Mistomeer]

I think what you forget in this is the case of pures. A pure has to spell up in order to hunt and can generally kill any creature in a hunt with little to no real risk in a few casts. Thus, if a pure is out hunting and they're numbed with 150 mana left over then they might as well burn the mana and fry (thus expending about 25 extra seconds) even if the exp gain is marginal rather than going in at numb, resting, then having to spell up again in order to hunt. If, however, they're numbed and don't have the mana then it would not be worth it to wrack in order to fry, according to your calculations.

In the case of squares and swinging semi's where the risk is greater and there is more effort then maximizing exp per hunt is probably worth it.

[Artha]

Artha, the check's in the mail.
Thank you sir. If it bounces, purple nurple time.

[Latrinsorm]

I verified that the formula works up to 5xx experience in bucket for regular experience.

Bounty experience is definitely treated differently. By my reckoning my empath got 798 experience for an 800 experience reward with 2xx experience in bucket. That's a 99.8% penalty, so I feel pretty safe in saying that even handing in a bounty fried would be pretty much the same as belled.

[AestheticDeath]

So you are saying the XXX is basically nullified by an unknown/unrevealed drain on how much exp enters your bucket?

[Latrinsorm]

I hadn't thought about it that way. I don't think it's accurate to say XXX is nullified until we know how long this spillage phenomenon has been going on. If it's been around forever, then definitely not. If they came in together, it would depend on how many hours a week any particular character hunts. The longer ey hunts in the non-XXX regime, the closer ey will come to "breaking even" with the non-XXX, non-spillage values (presuming such values ever existed). It would also depend on when the character goes out to hunt (muddled, clear, etc.), the size of the character's bucket, and so on.

[AestheticDeath]

That'd be pretty sickening to me, if they put in something to make us think we we're getting more experience at times... when we are actually just getting hoodwinked.

I don't know why they try and slow it down as much as it is right now. Seriously, if its an RP game, how the hell do you see any merit in making progress in the game so sluggish. Just makes it so you have to do MORE hunting and experience gain crap to try and get anywhere. I'd say get rid of the absorption, give us what we earn when we earn it so we don't lose an hours worth or hunting (or less for those that just fry asap). Forget about the bonus and penalty stuff.

edit to add --> Let people have some sort of sense of accomplishment by getting to the cap without power hunting for 1-2 years, or casual hunting for 5+. Used to be there was no cap, that was awesome. Now that there is a cap, there is a goal. And it would be nice to be able to reach that goal before you get really sick and tired of playing the game. If it wasn't so tiresome and time consuming, less people would feel the need to buy characters.

[Latrinsorm]

It only takes 3 more kills to (fully) fry at like level hunting with pulses of 18 in the field. Getting pulses of 27 at a node, that means that each hunt (leaving at muddled) will take 1.5 more minutes in the field, which means a "loss" of one pulse, or 1.5*9=13.5 experience, per hunt (on average). Conversely, adding XXX results in a gain of 9 phantom hours a week. This means that a person who hunts 9 hours will have "double" experience. A hunt/defry lasts 4 (wait for gen, hunt) + 2 (travel, sell) + 7 (defry) = 13 minutes, so we'll say 4 per hour, or a loss of 54 experience per hour. The character in this example will average about 1500 experience absorbed per hour, so the XXX+spillage character will come out ahead of the noXXX+nospillage character until they've played enough hours so the XXX results in a 3.6% bonus, or when the 9 phantom hours comprise 3.6% of actual playing time, or when you've played 250 hours in the week.

So try to stay below 250 hours per week (weeks generally consist of 168 hours) and you'll be ok. :)

Where the spillage really kills is when you underhunt significantly and when creatures take a long time to gen/kill, but we already knew that was a sucky situation.

[Artha]

I don't know why they try and slow it down as much as it is right now.
Because people quit when they hit the cap since there's no endgame. Sure, you have people like Soulpieced or Evarin who just want to max out their characters, or people like Tsin who just farm the shit out of everything to make a buck...but I'd wager the turn over from people like Nakiro or Nevermind outweighs it.

[AestheticDeath]

Who, or how many people have actually quit just because they hit the cap?
Out of how many players that have hit the cap? People leave for a ton of reasons, I have a hard time beleiving people would leave just because they got 7.57m exp on one character. There are other professions to try etc..

[TheEschaton]

I've not played my cleric much at all since he capped - but I still play with my under cap characters.

-TheE-

[Artha]

Who, or how many people have actually quit just because they hit the cap?
Out of how many players that have hit the cap?
I don't have those figures, and they'd probably be hard to track because of account sellage.

And if you have a level 100 character and start an alt and have fun with that, more power to you. But considering the whole point of leveling in GS is to see bigger numbers in front of you, it stands to reason that you won't like seeing 20s and 30s.