negative xp from lower level areas

very, VERY true GM really is a goal not necessarily needed except for the very dedicated TY

 

Why certainly, I took almost everything I wanted to 70 before setting it to maintain, now I'm working those to GM at a slower pace as to not run out of things to kill..

 

For a quite reasonable tuition rate, I can start you on a fast track to earn an advanced degree. Best of all, you will be able to apply some of your credits to both your bachelor's and advanced degree, accelerating your path towards both!

 

I can only offer lame analogies, either somehow related to beer or alternatively sink/faucet themed. If I try really hard, maybe somehow combine the two.

 

Well if your creative enough, disconnect the peatrap, lie on your back and have your wife (or insert whoever here) pour as much beer down the sink as you can handle!

 

That is incorrect. Rabbits are rabbits no matter where you find them. Their level of "difficulty" is based on YOUR skills, NOT where the rabbits live.
Sorry, but I didn't want you to keep thinking that...

 

Perhaps not literally rabbits, in SotA, then - but wolves or bears, if you can skin a smaller one then anything not hugely different, or magically altered, should not really get much more difficult depending where you happen to kill it - but it does... cotton plants get harder to harvest depenring where they are..... that principle, I was meaning, makes little sense to me.

 

XP Gurus, can anyone clarify everything that goes in and that comes out of each XP bar?

We have two skill tabs (crafting and adventuring) and two experience bars (pooled producer and pooled adventurer). My brain associates the crafting skill tab and the skills listed there with the pooled producer bar, and the adventuring skill tab and skills listed there with the pooled adventurer XP bar. I gather a lot and really do not have to pay attention to the mechanics for the pooled producer bar because points magically continue to increase there as I play. But I'm keeping my eye on the pooled adventurer bar for obvious reasons.

What I haven't figured out is why I can get to a mine, kill what needs to be killed, note the value of XP in the pooled adventurer bar, mine ore and crystals for 2 or 3 hours while killing absolutely nothing, raise mining skills several times, and the XP in my pooled adventurer bar has dropped substantially. Thinking there was a division between fighting versus gathering/crafting experience and skills, I expected the XP needed to increase the mining skills, listed on the crafting tab, to come from the pooled producer bar, which obviously was an incorrect assumption.

[Edit:] I've tested the past two evenings, in 2 different mines, writing down the XP numbers for both bars and whether it was a failure to harvest or a success. It's working like I would expect now--every mining harvest impacted only the Producer XP bar. Points were gained for the successes; points were removed for failures; nothing extra was removed when a mining skill leveled (no other skills leveled during testing).

 

Well, Chris probably could We mere mortals can only make guesses, hopefully educated ones, based on measurement and observation.

I haven't noticed this phenomenon but then again I haven't looked. You say "substantial" - how much exactly?

The gained XP never decays - only skills do. So if the XP bar value drops, then it is being used for something - either a) to train a skill or b) to compensate for decay in an existing skill (if you have set the skill in maintain mode).

If the XP drop is repeatable (2-3 hours of mining always results in similar drop in XP bar), then it is conceivable that it is indeed being used for something. I don't know about the exact mechanisms of maintain mode (how often is the xp compensation for skill decay from the pool applied) but it might be one candidate (if you have a lot of high level skills in maintain mode). Another option is that the act of mining exercises (spends adventuring xp to) some innate skills on the adventuring side, for example mining might improve strength, gathering might improve dexterity, felling trees might improve a little bit of both, fishing might improve intelligence and focus...just imagined examples. A third option would be that it's a bug. The fourth option - that exercising mining skills would as such eat up the adv xp pool - does not sound believable.

The only (semi-)reliable way to find out is to test it out by turning off skills. First watch your xp bar closely when mining - record the value every successful mining attempt, or at least make a note if there is a change. If there is any change, proceed by putting your adventuring innates out of training mode. Look for those skills with the green triangle and a mention about gaining xp via "relevant skills", and either set them to maintain or completely off. Then again watch your xp bar when mining. Record the value every successful mining attempt, or at least make a note if there is a change. If it does stop dropping (when all the adv innates are either off or maintained), put the skills back to training mode one by one, and watch the xp bar while mining.

If, on the other hand, the XP bar is not affected by mining attempts but continues dropping consistently (after 2-3 hours of mining), then I can't find any other explanation than skill decay compensation - you could then verify this by setting everything in adv trees to "off".

edit - some elaborations and clarifications

 

I'm not nearly as into immersion as others here, but if I'm forced, constantly, to think "if I kill this critter what will happen to this little bar at the bottom of my screen" then it's more like I'm in math class and guessing at answers as opposed to actually playing a game.

As with numerous other features, please give us more lore and gore, less chore, snore and bore.

 

They should put that bar back to the "V" Statics. And add next to the "total XP available" the "total XP spend in skills" number.
If you are really interested you can see it in the "V" Window. And when you compare the "spend" value after a gaming session you see that it increased no matter which level that rabbit had.

 

There is no math class.
There are a lot of skills in a lot of trees.
They have given us the ability to manage our skill gains, and if they had not - then we'd all be screaming for the exact same controls they have already given us.

You do NOT have to micro manage your skills if you don't want to, but you can if you wish. I love that.
Just open whatever skills you think you want to raise and then just go out and PLAY.

You will gain in whatever you use, with no math class.

 

Calculus and physics have given us the ability to build bridges, and yet this is not what I want to do in my spare time. I've tinkered with this quite a bit and I actually understand the mechanics. In-game, the result is that I think more about how to game this system than I do simply enjoying combat which remains cumbersome, if we're being charitable. When the mechanics overwhelm the joy of simple gameplay, you have failed as a game designer. This game is rampant with such mechanics, in all sorts of contexts. It is like the sandbox is game design for the devs, not actual game play for the players.

 

Turn off the skills and try it again and you'll see how much you are getting. If you are only doing tier-1 stuff, it won't be much. Then turn it back on and do the math to figure out how much it costs you. In R24 when I GMed smelting, it ate up about 1100XP per smelt at 99.

It's a lot harder to see in harvesting, but I have blades skill "on the verge" of GM (currently 97.5), and once I hit 95, I could hover over the adventurer XP bar while fighting something and see the XP go down, then the big bump at the end when I got back ~1500XP, which was less than I spent! When you get up into the 90s, it can drain your pool so fast.

Until this release, it was basically impossible to use up all the producer XP you got from harvesting because it applied too slow. They've now adjusted it to be much closer to what it should be. Up to 80 or so it's not too bad, but don't turn everything on anyhow. Survey distance is generally lame and not worth leveling, and meticulous can wait until you get the other two skills where you want them.

I was able to GM both mining and mining speed, but once I hit 90, I turned mining speed off, and it still took a lot of work to get those last 10 points. Then I locked mining and turned speed back on after I got a little more in my pool, but it devastated it to about 130K. I'm slowly getting back to 200K, but I've also run out of my 4x. But it sure made for a quick GM.

So if she wants to not lose pool XP, then set those skills to maintain for a while.

 

Managing skills. What a stupid waste of time. What in the world does this have to do with a fantasy game? Wasn't the idea to be that if we used a skill more we got better at it? Skill decay, skill on/off toggling, thousands of gold to train, what an absolute bore in details that make sense only from a game designing perspective. Give me skill points with a hard cap and have me seek out a very low cost trainer for the specialization I want, but enough with the gold sink and management tedium. I haven't even had the desire to do more than grind for gold to hold my location and I'm beginning to wonder if I even care about that anymore. I want to play a game and have adventures not take on another career.

 

Yeah, this skill micromanaging definitely misses the mark on what makes use based systems enjoyable. Maybe it's just because they reveal too much of it and allow too much control. I feel like the exp pool stuff is normally something that would go on behind the scenes and not really be visible to the player.

 

People are being very dramatic, its not that hard.

I love the skill system. I was a bit confused at first but read a couple of paragraphs of text on the forum about it, and gave it a deeper try. Ive figured it out, and dont go into xp drains anymore ever, and the skills I focus on at a time level very quickly. Even if someone chose to work on every single skill tree for their char, its not that hard to manage. More likely youre only managing 2-3 skill trees at a time, which is pretty trivial. I mean theres like 6-7 decisions to make, feasibly, every so many days IRL. Once you figure out how to tweak your training of the skills you want, its pretty easy. Im even killing low level stuff so I can harvest a lot of resources at the same time and I never go into exp negative, plus the couple of skills I am training are going up pretty quickly.

Oh and I cant say I've done any "math" either, other than observing the differences between exp pool growth and shrinkage.

 

It's not even confusing if your only rule is "set each skill to maintain when it hits 80".

 

Well, I'm not sure on SotA, but in UO when one was a Grandmaster in a crafting skill they could mark their crafted items with their name.

 

In SotA, compared to say a lvl80 skill, grandmastery gives a) bragging rights, b) slightly better stats (e.g. 100 vs 80, about 11% better if I have understood correctly) and c) when exercising a skill, people spend xp from their pool slightly faster if they team up with a grandmaster of that skill.

As to marking the items, up to this point every crafted item has had its maker's name on it, GM or not. Whether or not this is going to go away, and be given an exclusive "right" to GMs only, I just don't know. Whether or not GMs get an additional "GrandMaster" prepended to their name, again I don't know (crafting GMs, please?) but not really sure why should I care -- the item in question is just what it is, just what the stats say (it might actually be more interesting if GM-made items would have for example a slightly better durability, but that's a subject for another thread).