Experience Split Question

[Nightbear]

I always hear/see people debating on Hybrids/Racial and how it affects the groups xp as a whole. Wondering if anyone has any proof/testing on how it calculates the experience pie.

[Caridry]

How Experience Works

Draft 1.0 by Dumesh Uhl'Belk (ref)

First, I'll describe a sample party and use a tasty pie analogy to help make the mechanics easier to understand. Then, I'll get more number and formula based for those who want the nuts and bolts. (coming soon... when I feel like updating)

Think of each mob that gets spawned in EQ as a pie, a very tasty pie. When a PC kills a mob, he gets to eat the pie. When players group together and kill a mob, they have to split the pie. However, through the magic of the group bonus, for each person in the group beyond the first, the pie gets a little bit bigger (2% bigger in fact) before we pull out the knife to divide the slices.

Well, how do we slice the pie? How big will each slice be?

The answer is that we measure all the pie that each player has ever eaten (his total xp). Then we cut the slices in proportions matching those relative values. So, let's say our sample group is a simple trio of Bob the Bard, Chris the Enchanter, and Diane the Druid. Since Bob came into the world of Norrath, he's eaten 150lbs of pie. Chris has had 100lbs of pie, and Diane has also eaten 100lbs of pie. Our sample group has just killed a mob. This mobs' representative pie magically grows to be 4% larger than if a solo player killed him. Then the pie is split with 3/7 of it going to Bob, 2/7 to Chris and 2/7 to Diane. The classes of these characters makes no difference at all. The only thing that determined how big each slice of the pie would be was the net total xp that each of them had earned since character creation.

But what about xp penalties, you say?

They most certainly exist. The penalties change the amount of pie that a PC has to eat to gain each level. Human warriors have to eat 90% of the pie that Human Druids have to eat to level up. Troll Shadow Knights have to eat 68% more pie than Human Druids to level up.

The important and painfully obvious consequence of this is:
A level 30 Human Monk has 20% more total xp than a level 30 human cleric.
A level 50 Ogre Shadowknight has 60% more total xp than a level 50 dwarf cleric.

Or to look at it a different way...
A human monk with 10,000,000xp is level 20.
A halfling warrior with 10,000,000xp is level 22
A troll shadowknight with 10,000,000xp is level 18

If the three characters above where to group together, they would all get equal slices of the pie.

But, But, you didn't say anything about the penalties when you talked about how xp is split!!! why not?

When the tasty pie is cut into slices for the group, the levels of the various PCs are not consulted (not directly anyway), only the xp totals for the PCs. The game code doesn't care if Bob is a human or an elf, a bard or a monk, level 10 or level 15... the game code only cares what Bob's total xp is.

What about zone modifiers?

Zone modifiers shrink or expand the pie before the slices are cut.

What does this all mean?!?
1. Group with people who have similar xp totals to you
2. Group with people who have similar xp totals to you
3. Group with people who have similar xp totals to you

See, it was so important, I had to say it 3 times. Please note what that really means. Race/Class combos with no penalty but who are 6 levels higher than you nerf your xp more than the hybrid who is the same level as you in most cases, especially at levels below 30. In your teens, a player 6 levels higher than you has 300 to 400% of your xp total... obviously much worse than the 140-168% of your total that a equal level hybrid has.

So, final thought...

Group with good players. An equal level group with multiple hybrids generally takes no more than 16% more kills to gain a level that a similarly leveled group that has no hydrids. Good groups kill at least 16% faster than bad groups. So, group with good players regardless of class.

Source: http://wiki.project1999.com/Experience#Experience_Requirement_by_Level

[Nightbear]

Has anyone done fact checking on this?

[Caridry]

Has anyone done fact checking on this?

I trust in the coding that it is spot on. With a chunk that large in the wiki un-edited for that long, it would have been largely contested/debated a long time ago.

[falkun]

Actually that page still exists on these P99 forums. An older, acceptable link for the forums was "project1999.org", which is now broken and only "project1999.com" works. I've updated the "ref"-erence link in the top of Tibboh's link and you can find the original post here (http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24405).

Please feel free to swap .org for .com in any links on the wiki, and I'll continue updating any I find.

[Lune]

Has anyone done fact checking on this?

Yes I have done a little, in this thread (http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=160967). The post above and wiki page are largely correct, but there are some unexplained aberrations in my experience. His points all still hold true, just know there are some quirks. The experience calculator I cite in the OP was developed by Naez and presumably uses the formula everybody thinks the server uses for XP.

Anecdote:

55 enchanter(my brother) and 53 ranger(me) are grouping together, fear kiting snared mobs with a hasted/DW charm pet. Enchanter complains about slow xp (he doesn't know what slow xp is). We check it out with a test session (making absolute sure we are both in range for every kill, and that everything was DB to both of us) and the ranger's experience moved roughly twice as quickly. We never group again with those chars because enchanter feels robbed, and I end up shelving my ranger til Velious. QQ

Very interesting. The reality of our situation was the opposite of the skewed figure: http://i.imgur.com/BBJeNMd.jpg

It still doesn't seem to match those numbers

Further testing with a non-charm, non-pet duo would indicate whether this is a bug in xp rewards with charm pets, like maybe his pet is stealing his xp.

Pretty much everyone just takes that wiki page as gospel. I have seen one other test involving a troll and a cleric duoing together from 0 xp but I don't know where it is.

[Littlestgnome]

Yes I have done a little, in this thread (http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=160967). The post above and wiki page are largely correct, but there are some unexplained aberrations in my experience. His points all still hold true, just know there are some quirks.

Anecdote:

55 enchanter(my brother) and 53 ranger(me) are grouping together, charm-fear kiting mobs. Enchanter complains about slow xp (he doesn't know what slow xp is). We check it out and the ranger's experience moved roughly twice as quickly. We never group again with those chars because enchanter feels robbed.


Whether or not the Enchanter was truly experiencing a "slow" xp gain seems more like a personal preference issue to me. That a level 53 player would gain a full blue in the time that a level 55 player only picked up two ticks of a blue seems relatively appropriate however. Keeping in mind of course that the total sum of experience required within each level is different, there's two illusionary factors likely at play here. First, that the literal xp total gained are in favor of the level 53. Second, that the two blue ticks and even the full blue bubble are accurate depictions of how much xp in pure numbers has been gained by each player.

The simple fact is we never see this reflected in a "you gained X amount of experience" manner. If we are to accept the totals listed here (http://wiki.project1999.com/Game_Mechanics#Experience_Requirement_by_Level) however we can see quite clearly the level 55 needs more total xp and thus their blue line movement will likely reflect that. And again, the blue line movement itself can be somewhat deceiving.

[Lune]

Whether or not the Enchanter was truly experiencing a "slow" xp gain seems more like a personal preference issue to me. That a level 53 player would gain a full blue in the time that a level 55 player only picked up two ticks of a blue seems relatively appropriate however. Keeping in mind of course that the total sum of experience required within each level is different, there's two illusionary factors likely at play here. First, that the literal xp total gained are in favor of the level 53. Second, that the two blue ticks and even the full blue bubble are accurate depictions of how much xp in pure numbers has been gained by each player.

The simple fact is we never see this reflected in a "you gained X amount of experience" manner. If we are to accept the totals listed here (http://wiki.project1999.com/Game_Mechanics#Experience_Requirement_by_Level) however we can see quite clearly the level 55 needs more total xp and thus their blue line movement will likely reflect that. And again, the blue line movement itself can be somewhat deceiving.

Here's the thing, the level 53 is a hybrid with a 1.4 class modifier. According to the totals you linked, he actually has more total XP than (or roughly equal to) the enchanter does at 55. His experience requirement to level would also be larger or roughly equal. If both the wiki page and what you are saying were true, the enchanter would actually "appear" to be leveling faster, or at close to the same rate. This was all discussed already in that thread, with lots of numbers.