Skill Decay Revisit

So I assumed that as of a few mins ago, I should already have my skills decay accrued to the maximum of 6 hours. I noted my level is 67, my ADV XP Pool was at 1,511,802. I went kamikaze and rez, my XP Pool is now 1,509, 401. So I lost 2,401 XP from the decay. That means it would take me to kill 3 elder wolves to get back the lost XP, which I could do that under 10 mins excluding travel time to an adv zone with elder wolves.

I forgot to take note on the PROD XP pool, but I don't think I lost much either (if at all).

I think we can move past the point of freaking about the skill decay, at least for the casual players.

I don't know about the case for exploiters and/or those who have been gather one millions XP per hour regardless of whether the technique is legitimacy, though.

 

According to the R35 instructions: " Adventuring Skill Decay: Skills will now decay. This is triggered when you die. Right now this accumulates a maximum of 4 hours worth of decay ever. "

Has @Chris explained anywhere that I might have missed - any of the math involved in the death decay ?

I'm currently dying on QA to begin tracking decay, so that I'll be able to see how much dying a lot will cost (since we who adventure nightly and push our limits die quite a bit).
What exactly does the "maximum of 4 hrs worth of decay" actually mean ??

 

Decay is computed like compound interest, but it accrued up to 4 hours and stay there. When you die, the pool xp will be subtracted by the amount. Then the decay accrued will reset and continue to add up until it hits 4 hours again.

The maximum amount of decay up to 4 hours depends on your adv and prod levels. There are computed and subtracted separately.

If you die 10 times within 20mins, you may lose less xp than when you dies once two months from now assuming you've been leveling.

At least at around adv level 60-70, 4 hours of accrued decay is way less than 4 hours of grinding at appropriate zone. From my last dead, it was around 2.5k xp.

On the last QA, decay accrued up to 3 days. I had a character with 200 GM skills. The xp u lost from dead was 4 mil, which still very small considered how much xp it would actually take get those skills up without asking the dev to set the skills ( definitely more than 200 mil).

 

Thanks for the clarification, @Roycestein Kaelstrom .
From what I've experienced so far in QA over the past 2 days, the amount lost is fairly minimal.
The screaming will begin as soon as the first Avatar has a bunch of 80 skills locked at exactly 80 or only a little above (or GM with little xp cushion) and they discover they've just lost a bunch of glyphs when those 80 skills become 79....

Beyond that, you mentioned that you had 200 GM's on the last QA, and also mentioned "how much xp it would actually take get those skills up without asking the dev to set the skills".
I wasn't aware that the dev's were setting skills for us in QA on request. Is that still happening ?

 

Even if they lose skill from 80 to 79, it's very unlikely that they will have to start over from the bottom of 79. Might need to kill couple mobs here and there to restore back to 80.

I'm hoping for more people to test them out before making another round of outcry.

As far as getting the dev to set up the skills, probably it's still gonna be case by case. Mine took about a week before they had time to do it. So this time, I'm just gonna test with whatever I got copied over from the live server instead.

 

So does your xp pool decay upon death .. or your skills.. or both?

 

Upon death, whatever decay XP it accrued will be first taken off from the XP stored the "unlearned" skills (assuming it is higher than the minimum requirement for later tier skills), then it will go to the pool XP, then the remaining will be taken from the "maintain" and "train" skills.

 

Thanks. Just to clarify: if you have xp in your pool then the decay upon death will only take xp from there (after the unlearned skills).. and your other skills will be uneffected..?

 

Actually, there is one more type, the "locked and not maintained ( - )". I'm not sure which priority would this skill assignment will be, though.. probably before the the skill decay is taking XP from the pool, otherwise, it would been set to "maintained".

But if the XP from pool is enough for the decay to take away, I have tested that the "maintained" and the "trained" skills will not be affected.

So better audit your skill training assignment one more time before tomorrow just to be safe.

 

Thanks so much for the explanation! I was more than a little confused by the whole skill decay mechanics..but you cleared it up for me.

 

The other issue folks may have is, if there adventure pool is low, they die and have a skill locked at 80 and maintaining. If their pool is not large enough to support the xp loss it would drop a level and there is no verbal/textual indication that they need to turn this skill back on to get that level(s) back.

So when you de-level a skill after death you should be messaged so you can inspect your settings for that skill, to verify it is either training or give you the chance to change it from maintaining to training to recoup the level.