Game Mechanics: 50+ Experience Table Incorrect

[Castle2.0]

Quoting a post from the player Eklorin. He probably should have shared this here. I will invite him to opine. You can find his thread here: https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=371701

This is not making the argument the raw exp amount is wrong for any particular level, but that the relative amounts are incorrect.

This could also mean the total exp needed in the 50s is much greater than it should be. It should be corrected in either case.

There is a jump from 53 to 54, as there should be. But there isn't the dip from 54 to 55 that there should be. It simply continues up at 8-10%. Let's assume that holds until 59, but 59 still gets the normal big jump. This means 51-60 would take 30% more exp on Green than it should.

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We don't know the raw exp per level, but we don't need to. We know the relative exp of 52-56. It's wrong. Data below. Let's correct it.

Originally Posted by Serendib [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Hello Everyone, Eklorin here. You may have seen me in Highkeep since the Kunark launch.

I have levelled from 51.2 to 57 so far by solo killing only Dyrna Nlith in Highkeep. Dyrna Nlith is listed on the wiki as a level 41 Necromancer in Highkeep who spawns once every 6:00, and takes me about 20-30 seconds to kill. I killed her exclusively to level from 20% into 51 to 10% into level 57, with the only exception was 1 or two random experience hits on a Trakanon raid. Dyrna remained blue con all the way up through and including 55. She started to con green sometimes at level 56, and more often at 57, but still conned blue rarely. This tells me she actually has a 3 level range, which starts to con green at 56 and would be 100% green at 58.

As boring as this sounds, it was actually quite a nice way to level for me, since I could AFK for 6 minutes and do stuff around the house and come back and nuke her 3 times [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Issue #1: The EXP curve for P99 Green after Level 54 is not the same as P99 Blue

I parsed my logs for the levels which I exclusively killed Dyrna, and got the number of kills for each level:

Dyrna Kills Per Level
Level 52: 125
Level 53: 138
Level 54: 227
Level 55: 247
Level 56: 267
Level 57: 50 kills wasn't quite 10%, estimate 550-600 kills

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The ratio of kills from one level to the next is then:

53 to 52 kill ratio = 1.104
54 to 53 kill ratio = 1.645
55 to 54 kill ratio = 1.08
56 to 55 kill ratio = 1.08

Relative to level 52, we have:

53 to 52 kill ratio = 1.104
54 to 52 kill ratio = 1.816
55 to 52 kill ratio = 1.976
56 to 52 kill ratio = 2.136

https://www.cs.mun.ca/~dchurchill/html5/p99exp/
If we load my EXP calculator linked above, it calculates the amount of EXP required to get each of 52, 53, 54 for a Halfling Druid as follows:

Level 52 Formula EXP: 24696485
Level 53 Formula EXP: 26712195
Level 54 Formula EXP: 43786165
Level 55 Formula EXP: 31889980
Level 56 Formula EXP: 34241420

These numbers match the values given on the p99 wiki "Experience" page https://wiki.project1999.com/Experience

We can see that the formula (which is correct on P99 Blue) is no longer matching on green. Level 55 requires less overall experience than 54 on Blue, but more experience overall on Green. Also, each level gets progressively harder after 54 by about 8-10% per level.

Issue #2: It appears that the amount of experience required per level is also too high

From above, the ratios seem correct for levels 51 through 54, so let's use them to calculate the ZEM for Highkeep. If we plug the amount of Dyrna kills into the calculator, assuming level 41, we get the following ZEM values:

Level 52 = 125 kills = 118 ZEM
Level 53 = 138 kills = 115 ZEM
Level 54 = 227 kills = 115 ZEM

These values for the ZEM for Highkeep seem incredibly low. When I was leveling my necromancer there from 44 to 50 (also on Dyrna) I calculated a ZEM value of somewhere around 175. The only way that I can explain this is if the experience numbers required so far to get through levels 52, 53, 54 are approximately equal to that ZEM discrepency, which is 175/115, or about 1.5x as much exp as the formula states.

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I hope this data is useful to you somehow. I suspect once many people get 55+ they're gonna start questioning their sanity as I have.

[Sabin76]

Since it was brought up in the first thread and is relevant to this discussion:

http://web.archive.org/web/200103051...aps/eqexp.html

It actually seems that the information we were working off of on the wiki (and Blue, I guess) was incorrect.

For those that don't want to click the link, it is an XP calculator (much like the one in the OP) that has the Hell Level mods dating from mid-Velious (long before the "smoothing patch") and they fit to the OPs data pretty well:

1-29: 1
30-34: 1.1
35-39: 1.2
40-44: 1.3
45-50: 1.4
51: 1.5
52: 1.6
53: 1.7
54: 1.9
55: 2.1
56: 2.3
57: 2.5
58: 2.7
59: 3.0
60: 3.1

This shows that every level from 51-53 is a hell level, every level from 54-58 is a double hell level, and level 59 is a triple hell level. These are different from those found on the wiki, so if I can confirm that these are what are used and are correct, I will fix the wiki entry to reflect this.

[ewjax]

I also have quantifiable data that supports the original post:

Data source: solo kills of entry area of Howling Stones mobs by a human Enchanter. Data gathered across many mobs and a curve fit performed to determine the average number of kills necessary to gain 1% exp.

Level 52: 1.14 kills
Level 53: 1.33 kills
Level 54: 2.86 kills
Level 55: 3.41 kills
Level 56: 3.62 kills

Conclusion: Level 54 is showing it is a double-hell level, as expected. However, Levels 55 and 56, supposedly only single-hell levels, should be showing much less exp required, but as can be seen, they are actually worse than 54.

[Dolalin]

I think the question here is: what is your source for how things "should" be?

That xp curve looks right to me from everything I've read and the in-era xp calculator supports it.

Here's a newsgroup thread from 2001 with raw xp numbers that agree with (probably because they reference, actually) the stratics xp calculator.

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/FdNJncznVJQJ

Now, if xp is different between Green and Blue, and Green works this way, then Green is right and I'd say something is wrong with Blue.