How can I tell what adventure level I am?

i see a few people with this understanding of levels lately, and it's a harmful myth. adventurer level is the total of all the adv exp you have ever earned, whether you sink it into skills or not. someone who's earned a million exp will be adv level 50 whether they've spent it all and have a pool of zero or have spent none and have a pool of a million.

everyone who believes otherwise seems pretty frustrated with it. wish i knew where it got started.

 

I'm pretty sure you're wrong. It is incredibly hard to prove, but it seems pretty obvious that it is a lot more than a number we use to express how much XP we have put into the character. I really wish we could get an official response as to EVERYTHING that this value currently does. I understand they are lessening its impact on combat and such, but there is still something going on here with critical chance and damage dealt. I can almost guarantee it. I wish I had hundreds of hours to be able to do tests and see exactly how much of an impact is plays on a character, but I do not.

 

you tell me you're pretty sure i'm wrong about how it's determined, and then you spend a whole paragraph talking about what it might be being USED for. these are two seperate things.

if it were based on xp in skills and pool, then it would be possible to lose adv levels to decay. have you ever heard of anyone losing adv levels? at all?

 

I understand what you're saying. I see that you're only talking about how it is determined there, and not what it does to your character. You did reply to ME before, and I was not really talking about how adv lvl is applied. I was talking about what its impact is. All I said was "dumping it into anything" I suppose I can revise that by saying "dumping it into any skill, or leaving it in the pool." It makes no difference in my overall point. By the way, are you 100% certain that the Adventurer Level can raise if you acquire XP and do not apply it to skills? Have you seen it happen when 100% of your skills were "turned off?"

I'll bet if you lost a ton of XP by killing yourself 1000 times, you'd lose an adventurer level. I'd be pretty surprised if it was NOT the case. You said it yourself. The adventurer level is based on total XP earned. It goes up as your XP is gained, whether you put it in a pool or apply it to skills. If it goes up upon XP gain, why would it not also go down as XP is lost? I'm sure you couldn't be Adv lvl 90 with 200k XP points total in your character (pool and/or applied to skills).

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I guess my problem is this (and I know that this is not specifically related to how the adv lvl is determined...)

It seems to be a mechanic that is doing things that heavily impact combat for an avatar, no matter WHERE the XP goes. I'm willing to bet that I could go ahead and take 50 million XP and put it all in a healing spell in the Life tree making it level 130 or something ridiculous, and then if I went our to fight some mobs, I 'd kill them faster because somehow... -magically- my hit chance, crit chance, and damage output are all higher, even though I didn't add a single XP point to a combat skill. But my adv level surely went up from all of that XP. That's what I am talking about, and that's what I think should go away.

 

1000 is stretching it, but I get your meaning because it's a slight effect thing you are supposing.

@Alley Oop is a very wise player who plays allot, which if there was a ghost in the machine, Alley most likely would see it. But I don't think all the ghosts inside our game have been discovered because they may not have been mentioned by Portalarium... meaning that "they could be there". I "suspect" some ghosts not having been revealed because I've begun a grand many number of characters within our testing and have noticed the changes within the stages... somehow being of drastic change. Yet noticing it and it being there are two different things when challenging their existence with no mathematical proof of their being there. It's a very difficult thing to do, as even if we set all our characters skills by artificial means, those suspected transitional effects cannot be fully realized from that perspective. It's an enquiring mind that becomes the detective within such searches for truth, which often times attempts to validate it's suspicions (being an ex-investigator of things this has been my observation). But that doesn't mean it's not there as well and thus a mystery where suspicions are concerned. I think it's healthy to be suspicious, yet until those suspicions are validated, they will and should remain only suspicions.

It's great reading this exchange in conjecture, because I'm suspicious there's something there as well but I must search for validation through what is actually known, or through actual experimentation.
~TL~

 

@Nikko : @Alley Oop is correct. You do not need to spend your pooled experience to gain an adventure level. I am not sure if you can actually de-level, but I don't think you do.

And you are correct about your 130 life tree scenario; your adventure level would raise and you would be that much more formidable as a "result." Granted you would be even more scary if you put the points into combat related things, but yea, fact remains is this hidden adventurer level plays far too large a role in the combat calculations.

 

It's the "far too" thing which I imagine as a suspicion rather than fact. When we get down to these minute levels in the effects that adventure levels bring, we're questioning a very savvy developer's ability to crunch the numbers and set the tone of our progress and how that progress may "feel as we rise". I hardly see it there to the degree of being able to determine if it's too much or too little, or even if it's what I'm experiencing's cause.
~TL~

 

More scary in PVP, in PVE level alone makes the biggest difference at certain points.

 

Alley Oop is correct in that Adventurer Level is based off total Adventure XP gained over the course of a character's life, whether you spend it on skills is irrelevent. I know this because I monitor my ALevel constantly and noticed that i gained a level over a period when all my skills were set to maintain. Not much to debate about this. Chris has also stated before that Adventurer level will never be affected with xp decay, only skills will.

 

Very interesting! This is the type of input that was needed. I was hoping someone has noticed exactly what you have (all skills set to maintain, and you see an Adv. level increase). So that answers that pretty definitively. Thanks.

 

Well, lets say I start a new character, and I put zero skill points into combat related skills, and I pour 100% of it into something like taming. I then I go out to kill some mobs, and it gets NOTICEABLY easier just because my adventurer level went up, then I say that has "far too powerful" of an impact. If I am wrong, and it really is a minuscule effect that takes 10 million XP to be noticed, then I have no issue with it. I guess I am concerned that it is probably quite noticeable far below 10 million XP. If the game is based on skills, then why am I getting better at killing mobs with 100% of my earned XP going into taming... or sitting in an XP pool. I really think it should be 100% based on the skills I choose.

 

Well, I'm going to quote Atos here to try and quell some of the misleading information and wrong information, hopefully. Who knows which way the forum wind will blow with this statements though:

"Atos: I reduced the hps/focus curve last release. It (meaning adv level) doesn't impact anything else except combat vs high level creatures. I'll probably flatten the curve a bit more in a future release
Atos: Those are really the only two things it is used for, hp/focus and hitting high level creatures
Atos: and I could see the high level creature thing going away or being reduced at some point. Right now it takes a 40 level difference to make something harder to hit
Atos: so if you're level 40 fighting a level 100 dragon, you're 60 levels below it, 60-40 * 0.5% = 10% miss chance"

Now if this system is NOT working as intended, we need to let @Chris know!

 

WE can never tell, we can only see the color of enemies and if a particular enemy has a really high dex or builtin dodge or something, how are we to know? I've parsed logs on encounters with boss monsters and I can calculate hit rates, but is level responsible or is level just being used as shorthand for Dex Int and Str by a lazy designer?

 

This subject is so very interesting to me, "How can I tell what level I am?", because of the over all user experience and how very much it impacts our game play, as well as with "at least" some of our player's further continuing user enjoyment.

Our skill advancement is suppose to slow down the higher we strive for, yet there's two opposing forces which join together in this effort, one being the slow of the individual skill's bar, while the other is a very empty experience pool. If allowed to continue on an "empty tank of experience pooled", then which skills become luckier than the others when that used exp is distributed? <---<<< That's one of the ghosts within the machine to me of exactly how that then becomes distributed. It's easy to say that it's only the skills being most used from the striking of their button, but is this the way forward in increasing my fun, "if I never had ever locked anything" and just continued my normal play? What is the remedy within an empty exp pool's frustration? We have so many threads describing this "user frustration" and how to combat it when we empty our exp pool, that I suspect this as being what needs the balancing act done on it to better that user experience. We all are almost forced to begin adjusting what our character is learning, or continue without a care "because we know those numbers exist" and we can lock our skills which begins the active player "funneling full of questions".

It's the relationship of the exp pool running dry and the slowing of the skill gains which effect players, that I think some consideration should be given to find the most pleasurable user experience when dealing with the frustration. Frustration within games is a good thing because it challenges us. Our game challenges us with a staircase of user interface controls which can be adjusted.

Do we need another level of adjustment option while drinking our exp?

Possibly not just to maintain or gain, "but maybe a slow gain option"?
~Time Lord~

 

Also determines quest difficulty - this may prove challenging or this is something I can do now.

 

I'd love to see even more control over the skills and how they gain points, to be honest. For instance, I'd love some sort of "level this skill until it reaches X level" mechanic, so I don;t have to watch the ones I am raising so closely. Some I absolutely do not want above 80, for instance.

 

I wouldn't put much faith in it, I got a "this will be very easy" message for a quest that included an ambush from 3 yellow Lich archers with 3 or 4 hardened skeleton backups. I lucked out because the AI can't path to save its life, but it was certainly enough to drop me in a hurry.

 

Adventure level has far too much of an impact. So yes you'd definitely see an effect even if you didn't train any skills.

Health base multiplier =(1+level/40)
Focus base multiplier = (1+level/33)
From here:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...hris-daily-work-blog.85584/page-2#post-811474
In that post Chris says that
"For a fairly extreme case of level 100 and all skills at 100, hp max drops from 696 to 593."
Which means that a change from /33 to /40 constituted a 13% drop in health for a level 100. ( (4.03-3.5) / 4.03 ) Which in turn means that it is the largest factor of all for Health & Focus calculations when you pass level 40, constituting about 50-60% by level 50 and 65-75% of the total by level 100.
It also means that going from level 10 to 30 early on (like from non-combat quest XP) without even applying the XP to any skill at all it still makes roughly +50% additional max health/focus.

Health example given the (1+level/40) formula.
level 10 = 20% of health from adventure level
level 20 = 33% of health from adventure level
level 40 = 50% of health from adventure level
level 60 = 60% of health from adventure level
level 80 = 66% of health from adventure level
level 100 = 72% of health from adventure level
level 120 = 75% of health from adventure level

Also note that the base regeneration rate of health/focus is based on the total max. Which means the more you have the faster you regenerate. Having higher health max also makes interrupts less likely among other things.
So the effect on your combat effectiveness of higher health/focus is not linear but rather closer towards exponential depending on fighting style. (Kiting takes more time and thus have a higher regen factor).


Compound this with the to-hit rate which also affects your chance of hitting a mob. (But no longer their chance to hit you).
Here you can find Chris' reasoning for having that:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...ut-chris-daily-blog.85583/page-59#post-815157
Which is the reason why a noob misses some of the time if they go up against mobs above their level, which just adds frustration without adding any game play value.
So I disagree with Chris' reasoning since the result isn't in line with the mentioned goal.

What it does do is prevent several low level players ganging up on a high level mob since they'd still miss dis-proportionally often. Which is also why most partys don't invite mid level players to that high level mob hunt, since they don't really add anything but still take a share of loot and xp).


All of which adds to why the PVE side of the game feels at first really difficult and then suddenly way too easy. That is because the game scales depending on your level as well as your skills.
This has a heavy impact on shortening the longevity of the game and why so many high level individuals feels the need for more and more difficult bosses etc.

Since that is a really big issue for a game with a limited budget and thus limited content then I've advocated for years that they remove any and all modifiers based on adventure level.
There is simply no need to add level as a modifier as long as we get that from skills anyway - it doesn't add anything at all to the game play nor does it solve anything.



(While I'm totally Ok with similar concepts for Crafting - where we want that feeling of progression).

Edit:
A very late addition here. I'm off course advocating that the focus and health should be removed from the adventure level calculations - While instead to offset that increase it based on skills, ie more health from the health skill.

 

I hope they increase the rewards for investing in stats like strength and intelligence if the plan is too decrease adventure level's impact on health and focus.

I know that the strength calculation for health is bugged and hope it gets fixed soon.

 

Thanks so much for your input. I appreciate it.

One thing I loved about UO was that nothing had "levels." I remember when I was getting fairly powerful in UO, and I found it truly amazing how I could run around in the world and just stumble upon some creature that would just ROCK me. I always had this sense of "I need to test the waters and see how I do against this thing before I truly know if I can beat it or not." I remember a black bear that gave unique hides that lived in some ordinary looking cave. He was awesome! I got hit a couple of times by him and couldn't believe how hard he was hitting. I thought it was just a black bear, but then I noticed that he had a name. I think it might have been "Grobu." I killed it a few times, got hides, and made a "rug" out of one of his hides to put in my house. I was always proud of that particular item and would smile when I'd walk over it to go through my front door on to some new adventure. I loved that aspect of the game. You run around and had no idea if you were going to run into some crazy mob that was super hard to kill... just living in a normal area.