FYI: Skillgain experiment!

[Dawis]

Hi all.

Quite a while ago I asked a question, and it seemed that there is no definite answer for that question. Does skillgain remain the same or does it change over time?

I promised to do some experiments and post some results. It was not easy but here they are.

But first let us get straight and precise once more what we are talking about:

Definitions
Skillgain - is defined as a skill amount (in terms of ESI value) you get by performing certain well defined activity. So we could define skillgain per one shot of opalo, or skillgain per one click on Damper BP, or skillgain per one drop of a bomb with certain equipment.


What we are trying to find out?
is this skillgain constant or does it change depending on some factors. The factor we are interested in this particular experiment is: skill or professional level. We are interested in this due to obvious reason: It seems that we are receiving less skill doing the same activity as our skill level increases.

Experiment Details

We defined skillgain as amount of ESI you gain (chipping out gained skill levels) per 10 000 clicks on standard damper blueprint.

Experimnt was carried out in several stages.
The first stage is fresh avatar. Starting with level 0 in all professional standings. Several runs were carried out, and the results were monitored each time.

Results

Here are the 1. stage results:

ENG     MME     MECH  BPC    ENGesi  MMEesi  MECHesi                    PED
249 	 266	 128	 0	 0.33	  0.36	    0.14	     581.75
399	 417	 234	 0	 0.36	  0.39	    0.16	     492.13
490	 509	 306	 0	 0.32 	  0.34	    0.14	     781.74
569	 596	 369	 0	 0.37	  0.38	    0.16	     492.01
662	 710	 416	 0	 0.32	  0.38	    0.15	     651.95
779	 836	 463	 0	 0.35	  0.38	    0.16	     558.46
876	 924	 500	 0	 0.34	  0.39	    0.14	     566
944	 991	 530	 0	 0.33	  0.42	    0.15	     524.98
1007	1052	563	0	0.33 	 0.38	   0.15	            592.83
1058	1122	594	0	0.4	 0.4	    0.12	     509.37

ENG       - level of Engineering skill level after run
MME      - level of Manufacture mechanical equipment level after run
MECH     - level of Mechanics after run
ENGesi   - value of corresponding skill gained in run
MMEesi  - value of corresponding skill gainer in run
MECHesi - value of corresponding skill gainer in run
PED       - value of TT loot gained in run

Each run TT costs = 700 PED

So as you see experiment total costs are 7000 PED with total return of 5751.22 PED. Experiments were not only costly but lenghty too.
i reserve the next post for result analysis and main conclusions.
Which will follow shorlty.

[Dawis]

Conclusions:

1. The skillgain is not constant but variance is small enough.
The reason of this variance is to be determined. And if there exists lootius there could also exist skillius, that is responsilbe for skillgain variations day by day.
2.The skillgain is not affected by your current skill level. Although stage 2. results are no published jet - I must say they look very similar. 2. Stage tests are performed by avatar with engineeging level 4000, so the difference in skill level should be large enough if skill level affects skillgain. The skillgain on 2. stage remains about the same, so it seems that it only seems that skillgain is reduced on higher professional levels.
3. Average ENGeneering skillgain per 10k clicks on standart damper BP appears to be 0.345 ESI after chipping it out.
This result leads me to some interesting thoughts. Assuming a young avatar joins the game and decides to become a top level crafter. ENG is considered one of the main skills, and let us assume that top level crafter needs ENG level 10 000. How long he have to click on dampers to reach that level?
Let us do some calculations
Chipping optimizer suggests that you need to chip in some 2279.84 PED of ESI to get to that level. Let us assume our young crafter is determined to do 10k clicks each day. That means that on day 6608, since joining the EU, he will be a proud top level crafter, that is unless MA will change something in skill system.
So young players get ready.. you need only 18 years and few months of nonstop damper crafting to join the elite crafter society.

In other words it is nearly impossible or rather insane to reach that level with natural skilling - of course standard damper may not be the best skilling BP around, but I would say that it is certainly not the worst and most probably offers best price / performance ratio.

So another conclusion to this conclusion - The crafting skill base grows up very slowly. I would almost like to claim that it shrinks, because chipping out loses 10% of skills, and whenever you see 100 PED chip in auction it means that 10 PED of engi is lost from global EU skillbase and some young crafter will have to work 30 days to gain those 10 PED back into the system.

This allows me to assume, that as crafting skill base shrinks or remains about the same, crafting skill prices could raise once again and even exceed previous levels if the skills will prove to be useful (car manufacturing), cause there will simply be no way to get large amounts of crafting skills fast.

[Xen]

Was it 10k clicks, or 10k clicks of materials at the beginning of the run? If it was 10k of mats, the results could vary merely because of variance in the number of partial successes and mats returned.

[Dawis]

Originally Posted by Xen

Was it 10k clicks, or 10k clicks of materials at the beginning of the run? If it was 10k of mats, the results could vary merely because of variance in the number of partial successes and mats returned.

It was 10k of clicks.. all the materials on loot were transfered to different stack - but I can not guarantee it 100% in all cases, because there is no way you can tell EU to put all looted materials on specified stack.
That is why i picked the click count to be large enough to bury small accidents under the heavy data

[WoenK]

Isn't the test a bit screwed if you take higher than level 0 BPs ?
Can remember from my early skilling, that I had quite a lot of failures and skill gain seemed also quite low.
Till about level 1 filters did work for skilling a bit, but besides that the SiB BPs were the most cost/skill/time effective.

[Dawis]

Originally Posted by WoenK

Isn't the test a bit screwed if you take higher than level 0 BPs ?
Can remember from my early skilling, that I had quite a lot of failures and skill gain seemed also quite low.
Till about level 1 filters did work for skilling a bit, but besides that the SiB BPs were the most cost/skill/time effective.

BP level affects skillgain.. but it is ok as long as we use the same BP..
This experiment was aimed to conclude is the skillgain reduced on higher levels..

If we want to know BP level effect on skillgain we need to do other tests.

[Bomb]

Can never hurt to inform the public. Always like to see new information especially since skill gains affect all Entropians. Keep it up.

[Dawis]

Originally Posted by Bomb

Can never hurt to inform the public. Always like to see new information especially since skill gains affect all Entropians. Keep it up.

I think i will, but It will not be so fast.. As I said - those tests are lenghty and expensive..
Probably tests with a gun would be more rewarding, but it would be more difficult to assess results, as in hunting probably many more factors than hunting equipment could affect skillgain.

[Joat]

Tests are always fun to do (well, almost at least ).
Some thoughts of mine about this:

Sadly tests are hard to compare with others as a precise tool.
Why? Everyone has their unique history, and also current status.
If two with similar skills, do a test, and one is just closing in to new
rank in prof stand, and the other has got the new rank, the result
will not be similar, as if both were closing in to prof stand or if
both had passed it recently.
What has been done before test? If one has skilled zero-cost-sweating
and the other has scanned for +500ped, the result will again vary
some, both in skillvalues and loot. If several join in and shall do same thing,
IMO they should do exact same thing for over a week. But still no
garantuee test will be equal...

So, that said, tests can still show a lot. So keep up the good work.

[Quint]

Interesting results, thx and +rep for posting (and for your patience ).

When you post the results of stage 2 (performed by an ava with 4k engi), can you please include the gains on bpc ?

Thanks !

Quint