[loramin]

I thought I filed a bug on this before, but I can't find it so I'm filing a new one.

Assertion: In classic EverQuest, tradeskill skill-up rates were not dependent on whether the attempt succeeded or not: you had the same chance of skilling-up on a success or failure.

What P99 Does: As best I can tell, P99 bases its formula off a later formula provided by a dev (I think from 2004). That formula gives a greater chance of skill-ups when the attempt suceeds.

Evidence #1: Memory

I know memory is crap, but tradeskills were my jam on live. Instead of reaching max level I was running around collecting components for combines, and spending way too much time on EQTraders.com. When you're level 30 (or whatever I was with Loramin 1.0 at the time), focused on tradeskills, and have too much time at your job to browse the Internet, you read every last thing you can on how to skill-up faster, and ...

... the overwhelming consensus at the time was that success had no impact on skill-ups.

Evidence #2: EQTraders.com

Unfortunately, EQTraders.com uses a robots.txt file which blocks the Wayback Machine, so there is no way to see the best possible classic evidence here [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

However, their forum does go back to 2002 (ie. just post-classic). If you just browse to the start of the forum, and read all the posts there, you'll notice something in aggregate: there's lots of "how should I get this skill from this level to that level?" But in ever reply to every such post, the only concerns anyone ever mentions are the cost or difficulty of obtaining the components; no one ever says "do this recipe because it's trivial is lower and you'll succeed more".

Evidence #3: EQTraders.com 01/2003 Thread on This Exact Topic

The best evidence I could find (and I admit it's not a slam dunk) was that someone asked a question about this very issue in January of 2003:

Is there a direct correlation with your skill in a particular tradeskill to the trivial level the recipe has when determining how quickly you get a skill up?

The answers are somewhat mixed, but in general they do have a consensus:

There (as far as I know) is absolutely NO correlation between how often you skillup and your skill level OR the trivial of the item. It has to do with something you will see referred to as RNG (someone explain this in detail again, I missed it the last time) and is why you will sometimes see people screaming about having to do 100-200 combines and often not even see a SINGLE skillup, and others will talk about having two or three in a row or over the course of only a few combines.

some people believe (BELIEVE being the key word) that if your current skill lvl is approximately 20-30 below the trivial lvl of what you are making, you'll skill up faster.

The higher you wis/int is DOES effect how well you skill up, with the smithing skill it is based on the higher stat between str/wis/int.


other BELIEVE that the last point or 2 before you triv an item are the hardest. (Example, my skill ist 121, what i'm combining trivs at 122)

since the RNG (random number generator) has a lot to do with stuff, it is impossible to know for sure how it all works, unless you were the one that actually wrote the code for VI.

No correlation in my personal experience.
RNG all the way.

I'll try to find better/more evidence, but given the issue with the absolute best and most obvious place for it to live (EQTraders.com, in the articles and not the forums) not being available on Wayback, it makes it a challenge.

Also of course there's the problem of players back then being dumb. But tradeskillers absolutely did record their results (you can find many examples in that forum in fact), and math nerds (some of whom you can also find chiming in in those forums) did their best to separate fact from fiction. Again, the best evidence of that was no doubt on the blocked site, but the point is tradeskillers were uniquely focused on statistically relevant data in a way that most other "I think X works this way" flawed player opinions weren't.