What's the deal with "permanent experience?"

[Mental Mouse]

How much of your experience in general is "permanent", and is there a way to increase this?

So far, what I'm seeing with the 'skills' command is that the skills with the highest percentages permanent are just the ones that have repeatedly been knocked down by death penalties -- that is, the non-permanent experience is getting weeded out.

[Leaf]

How much of your experience in general is "permanent",

By default, 10%

and is there a way to increase this?

Yes.

One needs to adjust the "permanent_experience_percentage" in the settings file *AND* also adjust include/config.h "PERM_EXP_GAIN_RATIO"

Keep in mind changes to these files will only apply to chracaters created after this date. "Old" characters will see some strange math happening with their exp.

So far, what I'm seeing with the 'skills' command is that the skills with the highest percentages permanent are just the ones that have repeatedly been knocked down by death penalties -- that is, the non-permanent experience is getting weeded out.

What you see with the skills command as far as numbers is something like this: (assuming 50% perm experience and no gain of XP)

lvl: 1 (xp1000/2000/50%)

This character is level 1 in this particular skill
They currently have 1000 XP in this skill; next level is 2000
50% of their *current* exp is permanent.

Let's say this character dies 5 times, they now have:

lvl 1 (xp776/2000/64%)

Their current exp in this skill, 776 is 64% of their total permanent experience (with some rounding)


Now, this same character dies 17 times (or 12 more times since the example above:)

lvl1 (exp 502/2000/100%)

They are now at 100% of their permanent experience, they can't loose any more.


Reference:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=d ... p_id=13833

[Mental Mouse]

Leaf: One needs to adjust the "permanent_experience_percentage" in the settings file *AND* also adjust include/config.h "PERM_EXP_GAIN_RATIO"

I take it then, that there's no way to affect this within the game...

What you see with the skills command as far as numbers is something like this: ...

Isn't that pretty much what I said originally? The flip side of this is that when the character earns back the 20% experience he lost from dying, two of the twenty percent will also be permanent experience. Go through level 10 enough times, and a significant fraction of your experience will be permanent.

My character's been killed so often that he's actually developed decent permanent levels in most of his original skills. I was hoping to find some way to protect his newer skills.

[mwedel]

There isn't wany way to protect newer skills, other than to gain exp in them. But as you note, if you die enough and regain exp in that skill, more and more will be permanent.

There is no in game way to make a larger portion of that exp permanent.

Note as a correction to what Leaf said: I believe the values can be changed and it will affect existing characters. The weirdest math is likely if the values are lowered - characters will have more permanent exp than is really possible.

If the value is turned on/off, that is most likely to create weird values.

[Mental Mouse]

I suspect that people would be a little more accepting of the death penalties if the (default) percentage of permanent experience was raised to 20% or so. As it stands, I've too often been knocked out of the range for a dungeon I was trying to explore....

[mwedel]

Even at 20%, it doesn't greatly change things unless you die a whole bunch. If you're in a dungeon and die, the first several times you're likely to lose just as much, regardless what the permanent exp is. A death could still knock off several levels.

Alternative death penalties (or a lower death penalty) would likely help this more than permanent exp.

[Mental Mouse]

The problem I have is exactly with repeated deaths.... making the permanent experience % equal to the death penalty % would mean that in the long term, you don't end up going through, say, level 11, as many times. And skills don't get trashed quite so completely, so recovery is easier.

[mwedel]

What is an appropriate death penalty is always a tricky question. It seems to boil down to be hurtful enough you don't want to die, but not so hurtful the character is completely screwed up.

It is extra complicated because dynamics change at different levels - at low levels, loss of 20% of your exp doesn't mean that much, but losing a stat point or two and needing that potion of life can cause a bit of a cash crunch.

It could be interesting to be able to buy back lost experience - that would be a way for high level characters to burn up all that gold they have sitting around. Lost a million exp - no problem - just pony up a million gold and you can get it back

Once again, at low levels, the characters would just earn it back. Not under such a scheme, any experience you earn would go against that lost exp first (in other words, once you got rich, you couldn't buy back that experience you lost at level 1, since the experience you've earned since that time has already erased that loss).

[kbulgrien]

Buying back XP sounds nice... but one wonders whether this is just one more way Crossfire would be biased against the low-level character (though it is not obvious to me what "Not under such a scheme..." means since that appears to hint that something different is done for low-level characters). In any event, it appears counter-productive to stack something like XP buy-back in favor of the wealthy rather than to encourage new players by making a feature like this available across the board. Many things have been done to "balance" the game that make it hard to begin a new character... and money is one of the things affected (it seems) in that it is pretty scarce at low-levels - unless someone helping the newbie out.

[blackrazor]

Perhaps make an expensive potion that converts a small amount (say 1%) of your current "loose" xp into permanent xp, within a specific skill.

example: Potion of Clawing Permanency, 1500 PP, moves 1% of your current loose xp in Clawing to permanent status.