[Torven]

Group Splits and Raid Exp

Originally experience was split based on the total experience of the players, not their levels. This was mentioned in the January 2001 Producer's Letter by Gordon Wrinn:

Originally Posted by Gordon Wrinn

In regards to the sharing of the experience penalty, it was apparent in beta, before the penalty was shared, that those playing characters without an experience penalty leveled faster than those that did. It was obvious that this would occur, but it was to the extreme that a group of friends, all playing together, would become separated to the point that they could no longer group efficiently in the mid to upper-mid levels. So we chose to distribute experience in the group on the basis of the total experience of each member rather than the level, in order to keep groups together.

This meant that the entire group shared in the burdens of all race and class penalties. It also meant that higher level players would have taken a larger share of the pie than they do now, due to higher level players having a much larger experience sum. Sony would have likely added something to equalize splits at very low levels however, because otherwise the higher level player would end up getting virtually all of the experience; especially since players start at zero exp. Adding an amount to each player's sum (like 10k) would seem to be the easiest solution, but I have no idea what they did.

They changed it to a level-based division in early Velious:

Originally Posted by Gordon Wrinn

This means that we must address the penalty differently: basically, for every kill, after all grouping bonuses and zone bonuses are applied, the experience will be split up according to level, rather than experience. For those classes that do not have a penalty, they will then be given that share. Those classes that have a penalty will get their share, multiplied by their experience penalty. Essentially we are creating extra experience to give to those with a penalty after everyone else has gotten their share.

Sony also added 5 to each group member level when doing the division. This was seemingly done so that players would end up with a similar amount of experience as at lower levels in particular the division would award too much exp to the higher level players otherwise. When I checked Darkpaw's servers I found that they still do this, as the math didn't work without adding 5 to levels.

The source for the +5 claim is Casey Webster who was one of the older ShowEQ developers. He discusses it at length in the "Pet Damage, exp. AGAIN!" thread here:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/7h7DhR63ZmwJ

In another thread he mentions where he got it from, although it's still done on Darkpaw servers so proof isn't really needed:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/tE0KxYd9rFAJ

It's commonly known that groups have an experience bonus. This bonus has changed several times over the years. Originally it was +2% for each group member after the first one, for a total of 10% at six members. This was changed to: 2, 6, 10, 14, 20% in early Velious at the same time they changed divisions to be level based and when they removed class penalties. From the Producer's Letter:

Originally Posted by Gordon Wrinn

Our goal is to get people grouping earlier, and provide them enough of a bonus where they do not feel that they are losing ground during the learning process. We feel we can do this by doubling the grouping experience bonus and by scaling it up based on the size of the group. Currently, the bonus is an additional 2% experience per group member, not counting the first one, leading to a maximum bonus of 10%. Following the next patch, the bonus will be as follows:

2 person group - 2% total bonus.
3 person group - 6% total bonus.
4 person group - 10% total bonus.
5 person group - 14% total bonus.
6 person group - 20% total bonus.

This bonus is applied to the total experience reward for killing a creature prior to distributing it to the group.

In June 2003 they massively increased the group bonuses and removed the sixth member from counting in the division:

Originally Posted by Patch Note

Prior to this update groups gained a 2% to 20% experience bonus for
having two to six members.

As of today this bonus has increased to range from 20% to 80% for
having two to five members. When a group adds a sixth member, the 80%
bonus remains, but the experience gained is only divided by 5 before
being distributed. The sixth group member no longer causes the
experience gain to be divided by 6.

Prathun (an ex-Darkpaw dev) posted this in March 2020 regarding Darkpaw's bonuses:

Originally Posted by Prathun

Was:
1 characters - 1x
2 characters - 1.38x
3 characters - 1.68x
4 characters - 1.92x
5 characters - 2.16x
6 characters - 2.2x

Is now:
1 characters - 1x
2 characters - 1.58x
3 characters - 1.92x
4 characters - 2.22x
5 characters - 2.5x
6 characters - 2.56x

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/.../#post-3885518

I ran tests in 2 and 3 man groups and I can verify that as of 2024 the latter values are still accurate. I don't know when the former values were adopted.

In Velious after Jan 2001, the exp you would have gotten from a kill in a group is this formula:
exp_from_kill = mob_level^2 * ZEM * class_mod * group_bonus * ((your_level+5)/(group_aggregate_level+(num_members*5)))

If a group member is more than 500 units away from the killed NPC's location then that group member is removed from the division. I measured this distance myself on Al'Kabor (late 2002 era) and on Darkpaw servers; it's still 500 units. If you're in a group with members inside the zone, and you're the only one in range of the kill then you'll get a "You gain experience" message instead of a "You gain party experience" message, indicating that you got undivided exp.

Sony did not check for out of range players until after the group bonus multiplier was applied to kill exp. This resulted in a bug/exploit where players could join a group then intentionally stay out of range of kills to allow those still in range to get the full group bonus on the experience even if all of the exp was awarded to a single player. This wasn't a big deal when the group bonus was only 10 or 20%, but after the June 2003 changes this allowed solo players to gain a very large experience bonus by abusing this flaw. Although when I did this trick in Timorous it didn't work, so there may have been two distance checks with the first check being very distant, which is odd. (I was about 7k units away from the group) I believe this exploit was fixed shortly after the June 2003 changes as I found a post mentioning it being nerfed at that time. Players for sure knew about the exploit back then and were discussing it openly.

Another exploit I discovered on Al'Kabor was that the characters that were outside of the 500 unit range still had their damage counted for kill credit. I abused this on Al'Kabor by splitting my group into two, having one half do damage to a train of NPCs using AoE spells including a powerlevelee in this first group, and doing >50% of the damage to the NPCs. Then I moved all the characters out of range except for the powerlevelee, and used a 2nd group to finish off the train. This would result in the powerlevelee getting all of the exp solo and with the group bonus multiplier. I have a video of this on Youtube. I used this character's log to estimate PoP level hell_mod values. This exploit no longer works on Darkpaw servers.

The Al'Kabor (Macintosh) server had another bug unique to that server: the group bonuses at 4+ members were way higher than intended because Hobart made errors when he tried to implement the June 2003 logic into the server code. He wrote a server patch note saying that he added +20% per member, meaning the June 2003 logic and not this weird super bonus at 4 members, so his intent is not speculation. Gnostica also says he spoke to Hobart personally and confirms his intent in the Zamiel thread. Utdaan makes a similar comment. Al'Kabor was kind of frankensteinish and had some newer code and data spliced into it when Hobart had some free time to add it. Combined with the exploit mentioned above, this bug allowed solo players to get 260% the normal experience value when grouping 4 out of range characters. (that's not including the 20% server bonus) See the Zamiel thread for details.

Raid experience was cut down to 60% of normal and without any sort of group bonus multiplier applied to it. Fester, a ShowEQ developer, says that in February 2003. I did a test on Darkpaw's servers and discovered that raid exp is handled differently now. The division is weighted by player levels and excludes any group bonus as expected but does not add 5 to the player levels and does not have any reduction. It makes some sense for them to have removed the -40% since group bonuses are gigantic now and that's enough to make raid exp much worse. It's plausible that old EQ may not have had the +5s either for raids however but I found no mention of it.

"Raid EXP is 60 % percent of EXP *AND* no group bonuses" (March 2003)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...-50-blue/page2


Allowable Group Ranges; Con Effect On Member Exp

The lowest level a group member can be and still get experience in a group is 2/3rds the level of the highest member.

Of course how the math is done matters for this, so I went on Darkpaw's servers recently to check. I found that:

40 DOES get exp with a 61
39 did NOT get exp with a 60
39 DOES get exp with a 59

So knowing that, I tried to make the math fit. top_level * 10 / 15 in integer math seemed to fit. What Sony/Darkpaw did/does exactly I can't say.

There needs to be a minimum range for the very lowest levels however otherwise level 1s couldn't group with level 3s for example. What this should be I can't say with certainty. I think most likely it was 3, at least originally. The official player's guide says: "At lower levels, which are currently defined in EverQuest as Tenth or under, the level disparity is set to three". Several older Usenet posts mention three as well. Whether that means a level 1 may group with a level 4 or it instead means 1 and 3, I don't know. I have a PoP era log shows a level 10 grouping with a level 6, but it could have been expanded at some point before then.

What happens when the killed NPC is green to the top level member and dark blue to the other members? This is not entirely understood.

You might expect the NPC to grant zero exp to everybody in the group if the NPC is green to somebody in the group, but this is not the case.

Al'Kabor players claimed that not only did the lower level members get exp from the green-to-top-member NPC, but also that the exp was higher than expected. Some comments from the Zamiel thread:

Originally Posted by Gnostica

If a mob is green to some members of a group, but light blue through to red for others, yet still within the 1.5x level range, then those people that get exp seem to get some sort of bonus. I'm guessing it's worked out much like the OOR bonus, but it might be some other mechanic. The peeps that are too high a level (they're killing green mobs) can kill like mad, but the younger toons get all the exp and don't have to share the split with any high level toons present. (We noticed that doing some shard camps, that low level toons would really rake in exp in some zone much more than others when in group. The SD shard camp is a great spot to test it.)

Originally Posted by Placer

From my experience using Provo to mow down hoppers in DSP with a 43-46 PLed toon. The killing of a green appears to get your group members the exact same (60%) that they would get if they were grouped with another toon of the same size. Now if the mob is light blue, it is much worse for the 43-46.

Placer also said this in 2014 on the TAKP board:

Originally Posted by Placer

AK would treat say a 65 and 43 grouped together on something green to the 65 as two 43s for the sake of dividing up the xp. I tested this lots in Velks and DSP when farming mats. The 43 would get 60% of solo xp (100+20% bonus / 2 players).

There is also a Usenet thread from April 2002 titled "Grouping and exp question", and they discuss this phenomenon:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/808NbZZRqBgJ

Originally Posted by Usenet Poster 1

However, from "my" experience when trying to Powerlevel someone without a druid (/em chuckle) If i have a character that is red to the low person but they still get experience, then they get all the experience from a blue mob that was green to the high character.

Originally Posted by Usenet Poster 2

I would agree with this. when I used to hunt with my druid and warrior and druid was some 5 levels lower, his exp would move much faster if the Warrior wasn't getting an exp message, or at least it appeared that way.

Originally Posted by Usenet Poster 3

I did just this in Mistmoore with a long-time friend just last week. I'm not sure if I was taking 56% of the experience or not; I do know that my Pally friend went through a large chunk of 46 in the 90 minutes we were there.

This however seems counter to Sony's no-free-rides ethos, so I suspect this was unintended.

At first I thought this might have been introduced later (maybe during Luclin) but doing more digging I found an older comment:

(September 1999)
"if a mob is green to the highest but blue or better to anyone else, usually the exp is divided ONLY between the people who can gain any exp from the mob"
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/zGqUcwcoRMwJ

Case closed? Nope. Other people dispute this: (I've found more than these)

(April 1999; note this is before group damage was aggregated for kill credit)
"If a member in a group is too high for the group, then the group becomes 2 groups for experience purposes (the player who is too high, and the rest of the group) and experience goes to whomever does the most damage. The group is still counted as one for looting purposes though."
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/tWUkWxLX9DMJ

"Also, while grouped - sometimes I got xp from blue things and sometimes I didn't." (April 1999)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/qMeMFPORe-IJ

"High level characters take a huge share out of the experience even if the prey was green." (April 2000)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/A71gx4EkTfAJ

This thread has several people saying the higher level still takes their large share from green-to-them kills:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/Ci1e6cams2IJ

So now you can see why I put little faith in player comments. Make your own judgements.

It's worth pointing out that before January 2001, the higher levels in a group took a much larger share of the experience.

Another reason to believe that green powerleveling was unintended is that light blue exp was supposedly reduced for all members of a group, even if the mob was dark blue to some members. Placer says this in his Zamiel thread post and I've found a couple other low credibility posts mentioning this. The evidence for this is somewhat lacking however, although that is the behavior I would have expected Sony to put in. (but then I would have expected greens to grant nothing to everybody too) It makes no sense to reduce it for light blues but not greens.

As for Darkpaw's servers, this exploit/trick still works today. (or something very similar at least) In fact it was/is a problem for me because I don't want to level my characters as I use them to parse things, resulting in my needing to suicide them. The reason I had to suicide them was because the exp would end up in level exp even if I had AA exp on when I killed grays with my higher level characters, so this oddity also suggests that it may not be intended. The exp the lower level player in the group gets is the typical level+5 split (i.e. they do not get it all or any kind of bonus) as any other kill but is otherwise not reduced in any way. I tested on grays and greens. Greens had no extra reduction for the players the mob is not green to like light blues supposedly had in old EQ.