Quest Exp
Quest experience is simple since it is merely a constant value per quest (but with a cap) and is sent over the wire to the client in packets. Better still, the recent addition on Darkpaw servers to display precise experience gain percentages allows us to obtain a quest's experience value rather easily without packing sniffing, which allows non-technical people to collect this information.
Robregen packet sniffed quest exp for some quests on Darkpaw servers back in TAKP's early years. This was very helpful not just to make quests accurate but also to verify that I could deduce quest exp from using the detailed experience gain messages that were recently added. By assuming that level exp is the same now as it was in 1999 -- accounting for the changes to penalties and bonuses and assuming everybody's exp is now like an old Human Cleric -- one can do simple math to find the quest exp value. An example:
Canloe Nusback in Kaladim is the Crushbone Belt turn-in NPC. On a level 4 Human Cleric played on the Vox server I got 12.432% from completing the quest. A Human Cleric (again the race/class does not matter anymore on Darkpaw servers) needs 37,000 experience to reach level 5 from the start of the level. 37000 * 0.12432 = 4600 exp granted from the quest. Robregen obtained that same value when he sniffed it from packets.
There are two caveats to this method however that must not be ignored. The first is that there is a cap on quest exp and this cap is 14.284%, which is one seventh the amount of exp to complete the level. (old EQ's quest exp cap was 25%)
The second consideration to be aware of is that Darkpaw added some kind of bonus exp to quests starting at level 8, which grows 1% per level for 5 levels then grows 0.5% per level up to around level 21 where it stays at 10%. The highest level character I used for this was level 30 so I cannot say how this might change after that. This bonus is added AFTER the quest exp is capped. (it also applies to kill exp) Why they added this odd little bonus I don't know, but I've done dozens of quests to know that it's there. It must be accounted for when computing the quest's experience value. To be very clear: this bonus did NOT exist in old EQ and is some newer addition. ('new' being relative; it could be 17 years old for all I know)
For example, the Captain Hazran Deathfist Belt quest granted 0.422% at level 29, which is 10,284 exp. The quest granted 10.275% at level 6 which is 9,350 exp. The actual experience gain from the quest is therefore 9,350.
My experience spreadsheet lists the experience rewards for 50 quests. This includes the usual experience farming newbie quests like bone chips and orc belts. Sony did nerf the exp for some of the quests however, so I had to do some detective work to try and estimate what the quests granted pre-nerf. I also have a large quest exp research and notes file. Links to both are listed below in the 'sources' section.
There's too much data to include in this write-up so I'll just discuss some of the major findings. It's worth mentioning however that I only found evidence for a few quests being nerfed (reduced exp) and the vast majority seemed unnerfed. Also it is difficult to impossible to estimate quest exp based on old user comments, so it's mostly a handful of 'this might have been nerfed'.
One major find was an Allakhazam comment under the Gunlok Jure NPC which listed in detail how many turn-ins were required to level up to level 16. That NPC is the Kaladim bone chip quest giver. This quest was notorious for granting too much experience. It was heavily nerfed on Darkpaw servers years ago, and maybe more than once. You can buy infinite bone chips on Darkpaw servers now, and hand in quest items stacked, so naturally they had to. The nerfs seemed to have occurred after 2004. The detailed Allakhazam comment can be found at this link:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...04956364492208
Right away from looking at his Gunlok Jure data you can clearly see the old quest exp cap was 25%. The quest exp seemed to be 4600, but I couldn't make the data fit expectations very well for some reason so there is uncertainty to that estimate but if it's wrong it's not very far off. 4600 is a stupid amount of exp for 4 bone chips. On Darkpaw servers this quest grants 250 exp.
I had found log chatter of a guy on Al'Kabor saying his Hero bracer quest turn-in granted 25% at level 1, indicative of the cap.
Captain Tillin gnoll fangs grant 4500 exp on Darkpaw servers, but older comments suggest that it was higher, about 7-8k. I found seven comments agreeing with 7-8k and only one with a much lower estimate. The outlier could have easily been a guy getting less exp because he was grouped. The Halas quest awards 8000 exp and it only had one old comment under it which indicated that it was also nerfed and awarded more in the past.
The goblin ears quest in Highkeep did not award experience or it was virtually zero. Two players in the Zamiel thread (Al'Kabor players) said they had given ears to level 1 characters to powerlevel them and the quest awarded nothing, despite giving an experience message. Allakhazam is full of comments saying the same thing, although one said it did but it's very outnumbered. On Darkpaw servers it currently grants 25 exp. Similarly, the orc scalps in Highpass granted no exp but on Darkpaw's servers now give 25. I also noticed that at some point they changed the coin reward for these.
Moonstones, both greater and non-greater, award 10k exp on Darkpaw servers. Comments suggest that this is unchanged, or at best it was only slightly more.
The Crushbone shoulderpads quest in Kaladim awards 29400 exp. This is quite a bit and old comments seem to agree with that value suggesting that it's unchanged.
Alternate Advancement Points
AAs were only 15 million exp, however Sony reduced the experience that went into AAs by 20%, so the effective exp for an AA was 18,750,000. The -20% is a bit strange and I can't tell you why they just didn't have a higher amount without a reduction. I don't know if AAs are the same on Darkpaw servers.
I found a few sources which made these claims, and many posts mention 15 million. The 15m-20%/18.75m number also fit when I tested it with observations and math using kill data from logs and player comments.
"updated alt exp slightly, it appears 15,000,000 is the exact value per ability point" -- Fee, ShowEQ developer (February 2002)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...22-2002&p=3048
"the raw exp value is still sent. According to the everquest.h in CVS the aaxp has always been sent in the charInfoStruct as a value from 0 to 15,000,000" (June 2003)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...st-Patch/page3
"don't forget, if your using aa-exp value changes, that theres a 20% penalty to aa exp" (March 2002)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...e-XP-Modifiers
"I was never able to figure out why my XP wasn't what I thought it should be, until I saw that AA is penalized 20%, and then it worked out perfectly" (February 2003)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...ed-for-50-blue
"I have found that AAXP IS nerfed by 20%. I.E. if you figure out how much XP a mob should give, then multiply by .8, that is how much AAXP you get. And, yes, I have AA set to 100%." (February 2003)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...-50-blue/page2
You can see my adding up kills and calculating experience estimates from them in my spreadsheet. I need to point out that there was a PBAoE reduction on Al'Kabor and that's why the math doesn't work for many of the tallies. I go into detail about this in a later section.
There was a common assumption/claim many years back that one AA point was about as much exp as level 51 took to complete. This is actually true only if you account for the hell level balance multiplier, which granted about 30% more exp for kills in the level, effectively reducing the amount required. In that case the numbers actually come out quite close. However that claim predates the level 51-59 smoothing, which occurred in late Luclin, so it appears to be a coincidence. If there were ever a dev quote making that level 51 claim I've not found it. I did find some player comments refuting the claim before the level smoothing, with them saying AAs went up faster.
AA exp is not modified by race or class penalties or bonuses. But there was an exception to that rule. Zamiel says that there was an old bug which was if your AA exp division was not 100% and it was split between level and AAs, then the racial modifiers did apply. I did not verify this but I found a few old pages that mentioned it, albeit not very strong claims. That it was even mentioned at all is evidence. I do not know when this was fixed, but it was active on Al'Kabor. (a circa November 2002 server) Hence any race with a penalty would have been ill advised to be between 100% and 0% AA exp. Zamiel claimed that Halflings however could gain bonus AA exp (slightly less than 4%) by setting their AA exp to 99% using the slash command. This bug seems strange to me because of the way exp worked: penalties were manifested by increasing the experience required to level, not by reducing the experience gained. So if it existed (seems likely) then Sony did some weird math.
Sony actually forgot to account for the hybrid penalty removal when distributing experience to AAs when Luclin launched. They fixed this mistake one week later.
This same patch also made it harder to gain AAs. Perhaps this is when they applied the -20% to AA exp. Either that or they raised the amount required to 15m then. Perhaps it was just easier for them to reduce gains by 20% than change the total amount of exp required?
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Patch Note
- Fixed a bug with the “Alternate Advancement” system. An artifact from
the removal of the class-based experience penalty several months ago
resulted in hybrids gaining AAXP much faster than they should, and
warriors and rogues gaining it slower. AA-point cost was designed to be
the same regardless of class.
- Increased the experience cost per AA-point overall after analysis of
point accruals accross the game.
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Hell Level Removal (HBM)
In Luclin Sony effectively removed hell levels using some quote "mathemagics". The solution they used was to do for hell levels what they did for class penalty removal, which is apply multipliers to experience gains for levels 30-60. In my experience spreadsheet I call this "HBM" which is short for hell (level) balance multiplier which is a term I borrowed from some old ShowEQ threads.
In order to try and figure out what these were, I added up the kills I needed to level on Al'Kabor and estimated the experience gains at each level. I mostly used my solo druid logs for this, so party splits were not a factor. The estimates I came up with for the HBMs were:
30: 1.65
35: 1.6
40, 45: 1.5
31-34, 36-39, 41-44, 46-49: 0.9
50: 0.75
51: 1.3
52: 1.35
53: 1.05
54: 1.15
55: 0.9
56: 0.95
57: 0.95
58: 0.835
59: 1.1 or 1.2
60: 0.75
These are estimates with a margin of error. Some levels are more accurate than others due to the mobs killed in my log. Levels 56 and 57 however I can confirm were 0.95 as old ShowEQ threads (
http://www.showeq.net/forums/showthr...-6-patch/page5) had packet sniffed experience data. My estimates for these levels ended up 0.952 and 0.953, so this is one way to confirm that my methods for computing exp are correct.
I'm extremely confident in level 60's 0.75 HBM in old EQ because the old ShowEQ threads showed this and my AK data shows it with no room for doubt. Darkpaw's servers seem to have a 0.5 HBM for level 60 and probably a significantly higher HBM than 1.1 for 59 although it's hard for me to be sure since I don't know the current exp gain formula. In the 2002 ShowEQ threads, Scott Hartsman says the HBM at 59 was 1.2 although not in a very assertive manner. ("something to the effect of 20%" he said) My estimate for AK's level 59 HBM was 1.1 but this could be wrong, however 1.2 makes the exp required for 59 slightly less than 58 if 0.835 is accurate so I question if 1.2 is correct. Of course the 58 estimate is likely not precise either.
I have discovered what appears to be a bug/exploit with how HBMs worked on Al'Kabor while researching for this document. It looks as though the HBMs were not applied on Al'Kabor if the exp was split between AAs and levels. I have ironclad evidence for the level 60 HBM being 0.75 on Al'Kabor (video and logs) but one of my videos shows my bard gaining exp from kills in level 60 as if the HBM reduction were not working. My bard had AA exp set to 80% and level exp set to 20% which I could deduce from the rate of AA exp gain. The level gain was going up at the rate expected if the HBM were not there. In another video I have a level 60 with all exp going into the level and it precisely showed the 25% reduction. So knowing this, one could have theoretically set their AA exp gain at 1% in levels with a HBM less than 1.0 and they would have gotten significantly more exp in those levels. Likewise they'd have lost exp in levels with an HBM greater than one doing that. This would make some sense since split exp was also factoring in race penalties to AAs erroneously so Sony must have had two code paths for exp and they neglected things in the path that handled exp when split.
The most notable Sony posts about hell levels and their removal were in the "EverQuest Third Anniversary State of the Game part 2" thread by Absor which was posted on Sony's offical forum. That thread no longer exists, and the Wayback copy of it also no longer exists. (Wayback has been losing pages) I did however save the Wayback copy of it to my EQ archive before it was lost.
For convenience I'll provide another Wayback link to a website that copied the Absor post:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020515...cID=1547.topic
For people seriously interested in this topic, I recommend getting the copy from my archive however since it includes more commentary. I will quote most of it next however in case the links break.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Absor 03-15-2002
After applying advanced mathemagics, the commonly known "hell-level" experience gain effect in levels 30, 35, 40, and 45 has been largely done away with. Further, the "post-hell-level" experience loss in levels 31, 36, 41, and 46 was driven from the face of Norrath as well.
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Scott Hartsman's response was also in the thread:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Scott Hartsman
We don't plan on releasing detailed mechanics - Some things people should really discover for themselves as part of normal gameplay. The goal was to smooth the path from 30 to 50, not to make it require less overall gameplay, or happen faster. The intent wasn't to get people from 30 to 50 any faster.
The overall path isn't any easier to reach level 50 -- a retroactive experience boost wouldn't really be called for. Down the line of what I said at the last fan faire, "If we did something with hell levels, we would have to find a fair solution that didn't affect anyone's existing experience or progress."
We found that solution.
Times change, people change, opinions change. The overriding opinion on the team is that hell levels pre-50 really aren't something that we like having in the game. This is also consistent with at least a handful of statements from the past: "If we could fix it, we really would." Those levels were a large source of frustration that really didn't have any context in the game world.
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Hell levels were smoothed in two different patches. The first patch smoothed out classic levels, and the second patch five months later smoothed Kunark levels. The classic level smoothing was mentioned in the March 19 2002 patch note:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Patch Note
The experience curve from levels 30 to 50 has been smoothed.
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A ShowEQ user posted that he noticed classic hell levels removed on March 18th 2002: (maybe a Test server player? or patch note date is off by a day)
"Pre-50 hell levels = gone.
I've seen it with my own characters... on a side note, the level after hell (ie: 31, 36, 41, 46) seems to be slower than previous. My thought is that they probably evened out the curve quite a bit."
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...?675-EXP-Chart
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Patch note September 4 2002
- We have smoothed out level progression from 50-60. This should
mitigate the “penalty effect” that occurs in levels 51, 54 and 59. Note
that it will cost the same experience to level from 50 to 60 as it did
before. Also, death experience loss will appear different in some
levels. This is an unfortunate side effect that must remain to prevent
some experience exploits.
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I can say that they did cut the post-hell exp loss (for levels 31, 36, 41, 46) exactly in half as it is that way on Darkpaw servers.
I would have expected Sony to have multiplied death exp by he HBMs however but this is NOT the case on Darkpaw servers as of 2024. The patch note sounds clear that death exp was modified in some way, and the obvious thing to do here is to multiply it by the HBMs. That will semi-normalize death exp in most classic levels to around 9.5% for non-hell and around 7.5-8.5% for hell levels, which you would want to do since the levels were smoothed out. Failing to do this will result in hell level deaths being greatly reduced in severity, deaths in non-hell levels being about 10% harsher, and deaths in levels 50 and 60 being 25% harsher.
There are consequences to multiplying death exp by the HBMs however. It worsens an exploit where players could store exp in corpses then resurrect them after leveling such that they would benefit from the hell level HBM multiplier outside of the hell level. Also if you die immediately after leveling in one of the classic hell levels then you'll lose nearly twice as much exp. This may be why Sony opted not to do this or removed it later. More logic could be added to prevent these issues however.
I found two player comments which indicated that Sony didn't multiply death exp by HBMs for the reasons I mentioned, but they didn't provide a source so I wouldn't consider this super credible:
"Also of note is that when the Hell Levels were "smoothed out", they did not adjust the death penalties. They stated that they felt that if they mucked with it, it would introduce exploits where getting rezed would grant experience above what was lost. So you still lose more or less exeperience based on whether the level used to be a hell level or not." (Dec 8, 2002)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/MuH-7xCfD4cJ
"My recollection was they specifically stated death experience wasn't touched with the adjustment formula, just like any bonuses in place weren't touched." (Aug 15, 2003)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/bKmrC3b-FBcJ
I did go looking for player comments in logs which mentioned how much experience they lost from death. The results from this were highly inconclusive. Some comments matched no HBM multiplication, and some did, and some didn't fit either case. Some contradicted each other. People are frustrating unreliable. One comment stood out though as being extra significant:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Usenet Poster
"I thought that when you died you always lost the same amount of exp. 10%.
It seems like this is about right except last night I died in Crystal
Caverns when I was mobbed by spiders, but I only lost 5%. I know exactly
how much it was because I have a custom UI that gives the amount of exp in
percentages and I had 12% before I died and 7% when I came to at my bind
point. Are there some zones that give you less exp penalty? or was it
because I was killed by greens? Or maybe the level I died at? Do you lose
only 5% when you die after 50?"
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https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/_Pz9Tt9wLykJ (Dec 7, 2002)
That guy was level 51. The expected exp loss at level 51 is 4.829%, or 6.28% if you multiply the HBM. This is more credible than the other comments because he mentions his before and after exp amounts using a UI that shows percentiles, and it matched the expected exp loss without HBM multiplication.
Kicnlag found this old Allakhazam comment regarding sacrifices:
"On Al'kabor you can only sacrifice level 60 toons to 46th. It took me 77 deaths to go from all but dinging 66th to 60th. (The exp bar was capped. We're capped at 65th on Al'kabor) I then sacrificed myself 138 times to reach level 45"
(source:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...55409398759577)
The post does not mention the class he was. His death numbers fit rather well for a warrior or rogue if you don't multiply the HBMs. My expectations for a warrior would be about 140 deaths to go from 60.99 to 45.99, and about 81 deaths to go from 65.99 to 60.99. If however he was not one of those two classes then my estimates would be 156 and 90. Multiplying the HBMs makes the 45-60 number fit worse.
So the evidence is strongly in favor of not multiplying death exp by the HBMs. It's possible they did something to modify how death worked in edge cases after the smoothing but I've found no evidence of it, other than perhaps one case in an AK log where the experience loss was apparently much greater (he says 19%) than expected when it caused a player to lose level 55. I should mention that when I checked loss on Darkpaw servers that I noted exp loss on death but did not resurrect any corpses nor paid attention to delevels.