EQEmulator Forums - View Single Post - A Treatise on EverQuest's Experience Calculations

Torven · #5 05-26-2024, 05:20 AM

High Level Kill Bonus Experience (MLM)

Near the end of Luclin, Sony added a very large experience bonus to higher level kills. This radically changed the meta for efficient leveling after level 50. The ShowEQ guys called it the "Mob Level Multiplier" in the old threads, so I refer to it as the MLM for short.

Sony implemented this in two patches which were two days apart. The first was on September 4 2002:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patch Note

- We have rebalanced the rewards for killing NPCs for characters over
level 50. NPCs that are considerably weaker than you will give you less
experience. NPCs give more experience the higher level they are, and
for the best results you should fight the most challenging monsters you
can reasonably manage.

This patch also included the hell level smoothing for Kunark levels, which cut the experience gains at level 60 in half. It also reduced the experience for killing low blue cons, which angered the playerbase considerably, causing Sony to revert the blue con nerf two days later, on September 6th:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patch Note

** Experience Balancing **

The combination of the NPC experience changes and the post-50 "penalty
level" rebalancing at once had a stronger effect than we anticipated.

We've altered a few of the changes to more accurately reflect our intent.

- The intent is to promote grouping, not to inflict a harsh nerf on our more
casual players who frequently do not have the time to invest in finding and
forming a group.

- However, we do not believe that going solo should be the single most
optimal way to gain experience in EverQuest, which is what it had become
prior to these changes.

That said, we'd like to take a moment and explain what happened.

On "Penalty Level" Rebalancing (Levels 51, 54, and 59):

- Many people saw much smaller experience gains at level 60. This was due to
the "penalty level" rebalancing effect more than anything that was done to
NPC experience values.

- In the previous patch, Level 60 became a full level, when it had been half
a half level the day before.

- "Penalty levels" have once again been rebalanced such that level 60 is
much closer to the half level that it was before, and experience was instead
redistributed throughout the earlier levels.

- The penalty effect is still mostly mitigated, however the distribution
should be more fair to those who are already level 60, yet do not have a
full bar in that level.

On Grouping and Soloing:

- From the point of view of a level 60 character, a steady stream of level
45 NPCs represented the single best advancement in EverQuest, when the score
is kept in "Experience Per Hour."

- With the advent of Luclin Alternate Abilities, nearly every sufficiently
advanced level 60 could eventually and easily solo these "optimal" NPCs, and
benefit more than they could in any type of grouping.

- We understand that forming a group, travelling to your destination, and
other inconveniences have an effect on progression.

- With that in mind, we've undone the penalties for killing low blue NPCs,
and instead added an additional group bonus to those who fight NPCs that are
reasonably close to the group's level.

- The idea is that people should be willing to take risks, fighting the
hardest NPCs that they possibly can, to reap the best rewards in EverQuest,
as opposed to the blue NPCs that represent the lowest risk.

- For both groups and soloists, we strongly recommend trying out harder
overall zones and the more difficult areas of zones that you might already
be used to.

- We're confident that you're going to find that the additional risk pays
off *extremely* well.

This second patch set the HBM for level 60 to 0.75. It was 0.5 for two days.

This patch note calls the high level kill bonus a "group bonus" which is a bit odd as the MLM applies even when solo. The group bonus at this point in time was still the Velious era one that went up to 20% with six members, and the June 2003 patch note says as much. Since the MLM would only kick-in on mostly unsoloable mobs near the player's level (at least in Luclin), perhaps that is why they worded the patch note that way. Notes are often written by people who didn't do the actual code and this also frequently causes some miscommunication. In another bullet point it also says "for both groups and soloists", so even this patch note contradicts itself.

The MLM Sony added was actually quite massive, resulting in upwards of three times as much exp for kills. It needed to be large because of how pointless it used to be killing level 55+ NPCs. This is one of the few changes to the game since Luclin launched that I feel was good for the game, although I might have implemented it a little differently.

The MLM worked like this:

It only applied if the player was level 51 or higher.
It only applied if the killed NPC was within 5 levels of the player. (i.e. on level 55 mobs but not 54 at level 60)
This bonus multiplier scaled significantly with player level from 51 to 60 and was fairly small for players near level 51.
At level 60+ the multiplier is 2.6 for a white con. So killing a white con granted +160% more exp than before.
It reduced or increased depending on the level difference of the player to the mob, resulting in up to 3x (+200%) exp on red cons at level 60+.
Checks were done to prevent grouping players well under the group average level getting this bonus.

My sources for this are the ShowEQ forums and exp data from observations/logs. Zamiel's thread in particular had some good observations. Soloers in PoP would get something like 8% of an AA or more for a single kill which allowed for these observations to be meaningful.

This thread in particular has the bonus scaling from level difference:

"Level_Modifier = (260 - 13*(level - mob_level))/100" (December 2002)
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...ed-for-50-blue

At level 60+, for each level difference, the bonus grows or shrinks by 0.13. So the multiplier for a level 55 mob killed by a level 60 player would be 1.95, which is nearly double the exp gain. I believe it may have capped at 3.0 because Zamiel's thread mentions this: "It is known that there is no marginal benefit for killing a mob over 3 levels higher than you"

Fester, a ShowEQ dev, mentions some restrictions on how the MLM is selectively applied in October 2003:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fester

Cases where you don't get bonus:

1) group with a group where the average level is greater than 5 levels above you.
2) killing mobs greater than 5 levels above you.
3) killing mobs greater than 5 levels below you.

This really only harms power leveling with a low level player in a high level zone.

There also seems to be a few other odd cases and I suspect this is one:
1) group with someone >5 level above you and they do all or most of the damage.
2) group where the average is less than 5 levels above you but the highest member is more than 5 above you.

In short, I havent found any way to kill with a higher level and get bonus on the lower EXCEPT killing ungrouped with the lower level and use higher levels for healing, buffing, nuke down from 20% etc.

https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...-50-blue/page2

He was responding to a poster that claimed his two person group of a level 62 and a level 51 resulted in no bonus exp for the level 51 while killing level 55 mobs. Sony apparently had some strict checks in place to prevent higher level players from powerleveling lower level players. I doubt these checks involved damage or hate lists however as this would punish grouped healers. It's possible, even likely, that he actually WAS getting the MLM on the level 51 however, but the MLM is so low at level 51 that he didn't notice and assumed it wasn't there. The MLM scales with player level from level 51 to 60.

Zamiel's thread has data from soloed NPCs at various levels, and this is where I got the scaling from. The thread discusses the best level to grind AAs extensively. The PoNightmare gargoyle data in particular is noteworthy:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zamiel

while soloing gargs in PoN (who are level 57):

24 kills per AA @ level 52
21 kills per AA @ level 53
19 kills per AA @ level 54
18 kills per AA @ level 55
17 kills per AA @ level 56
16 kills per AA @ level 57 (with 2% AA left over)
16 kills per AA @ level 58 (with 5% AA left over)
16 kills per AA @ level 59 (with 6% AA left over)
15 kills per AA @ level 60
16 kills per AA @ level 61 (with 0% AA left over)

in this case the optimal level to kill level 57 mobs is actually level 60 (a +3 differential), which seems counter-intuitive.

Zamiel and the Al'Kabor folks didn't know about the MLM. They just noticed some oddities when trying to figure out the most optimal level to grind AAs in. Here Zamiel notices that the best level to kill gargoyles for AAs is actually three levels above the mob's level, which is very unexpected. The explanation for this is that the MLM scales by player level and is smaller the lower under level 60 you are.

The MLM is 2.6 for white cons at level 60 through 65. It doesn't increase after 60. Since the MLM is a multiplier, another way to read it would be +160% more exp. Zamiel's thread also mentions that killing white cons in Plane of Nightmare at level 59 resulted in an MLM of about 2.43, which is 0.17 less than 2.6, and this is within margin of error of 0.16. The patch note said that the bonus applies to characters over level 50, so it fits that the base MLM for whites would scale linearly by 0.16, or +16%, for every level after level 50 up to 2.6 at 60. This is why arguably the best level to grind AAs in was level 60.

Working on the assumption that the MLM is +0.16 for each level above 50 for white cons, the next task is to try and figure out the scaling for blues and yellows/reds. The gargoyle data gives us the final MLM values for those levels, so it's just a matter of finding for X. Here too I also simply tried adding 0.013 for each level above 50 in a linear fashion, and this worked on the blue kills but not the yellows and reds. I found that if I divided this in half then it fit the yellows and reds fairly well. However for kills at or after level 60 the scaling should not be divided in half.

The final model I came up with for the MLM is this:

Code:

level_diff = mob_level - player_level

if ( player_level >= 60 ) then
	mlm = 2.6 + 0.13 * level_diff
	if ( mlm > 3.0 ) then
		mlm = 3.0
	end
else if ( player_level > 50 ) then
	base = 1.0 + (player_level - 50) * 0.16
	scale = 0.013 * (player_level - 50)
	if ( level_diff > 0 ) then
		scale = scale / 2
	end
	mlm = base + scale * level_diff
end

If you read Zamiel's thread for exp data, it's important to understand how I calculated the experience. Al'Kabor had a 20% server bonus, and players there often abused the out of range group bonus bug, so to calculate experience on AK with 4 members in the group out of range, you would do this:

exp = mob_level * mob_level * ZEM * 1.2 * 2.6 * MLM

PoNightmare's ZEM was 145 and the 2.6 is the bugged group bonus on Al'Kabor with 5 or 6 members. (it also being 2.6 is seemingly a coincidence) I used 18,750,000 for an AA point. Also note that the sixth man on AK was NOT free when dividing among the group.

When Sony changed the con colors in Serpent's Spine they (I think) made dark blue 5 levels wide for players above level 50. The MLM being +/-5 levels may be the reason they did that.

I had found two ShowEQ threads which discussed the MLM right after the patches which have explicit exp data, so I was excited to find them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021014...&threadid=1870
https://www.showeq.net/forums/showth...ember-6-patch/

The threads show that the MLM was calculated differently in the first patch and then changed two days later to what I outlined. At first it scaled linearly from the lowest dark blue up to (presumably) red cons, including a nerf for the low dark blues, but at two different scale rates. The big bonus level range looks like it was +/-6 instead of 5 levels wide, and the levels under that got a bonus or penalty scaled by 10% instead of 13%, such that a level 50 NPC killed by a level 60 player granted the same exp as before and a level 45 NPC granted half the exp. This is academic since I doubt any server would want to implement this but it's interesting from a historical standpoint I suppose.

In these threads you can also see several HBMs: level 60's HBM went from 0.5 to 0.75. Level 56 and 57 were 0.95. Scott Hartsman chimes in and mentions that level 59's HBM was 1.2, but that was not what I calculated on Al'Kabor, where it was 1.1 but my estimate could be incorrect.

Also, importantly, one guy calculates MLMs for a level 56 character killing level 51-53 mobs in the second thread, and his numbers match my model's results precisely.

I cannot say how the MLM changed after Planes of Power and the above should be assumed to apply to PoP era EQ only. I can say however that on 2024 Darkpaw servers, the exp scaling is very different and looks more like the September 4 2002 patch scaling as it's very gradual. Exp gains on Darkpaw servers seem radically changed and I have little understanding of how it works.

Individual NPC Multipliers

Some NPCs in Planes of Power award more or less exp when killed than would normally be awarded by the standard formula. This is easy to see from the amount of movement in the experience bar compared to other NPCs of the same level with the same ZEM. Sony seems to have added some kind of individual experience modifier to NPC types in PoP. I'm unaware of any cases in prior eras, so I think it's probably a PoP addition but I can't be sure.

The level 68 mobs in Plane of Fire had a large exp bonus applied to them. In the Zamiel thread, Al'Kabor players mentioned these NPCs and how much exp they got from them, which was 21% of an AA solo or 55% solo with 4 OOR in group. The standard exp for these would otherwise be 13.273% on Al'Kabor.

68 * 68 * 150 * 1.2 * 2.99 = 2,488,637 / 18750000 = 13.273% (remember AK had a 20% server bonus)

So the level 68 PoFire NPCs were awarding 60% more exp than expected on Al'Kabor. The reasoning behind this was probably because level 66+ NPCs all quad attack, and these did have more hp and hit hard, but they didn't summon and were snareable which was a questionable decision given the exp awarded.

I checked well over 100 NPCs on Darkpaw's servers and I did find that these individual multipliers still exist, but some of them appear to have been nerfed. This doesn't surprise me since some of the multipliers were rather large and it probably made other places too unattractive. Particularly after Sony removed the flag requirements to enter into elemental planes.

I discovered that Darkpaw's level 67 flamehead mobs in the second field of PoFire awarded more exp than the level 68s did. The level 66 bridge golems granted the most at +75%, above that of the 67s and 68s. That makes sense because they are the hardest common mobs the zone. What I suspect happened is that Sony or Darkpaw nerfed the bonus exp on the 68s at some point but left the others alone. The 68s now award +25% more instead of +60% more, and the 67 flameheads award +40% more as they probably always have.

The level 65 flameheads and djinn NPCs in the first fortress area in PoFire have a 25% bonus to them on Darkpaw servers. I was able to check one of my old personal July 2003 logs where I was exping there, and I can confirm that they were 25% back then as well. The second field mobs also have significant modifiers on them but these modifiers vary.

This thread from May 2003 (about half a year after PoP launch) also verifies the +25% and +60% bonus multipliers: https://web.archive.org/web/20050320...php/t-475.html

I also noticed a reduction in Plane of Water: the level 68 hraquis NPCs actually award less exp than the baseline which is especially unusual for a water zone, and the regrua only award 12 or 17% over the baseline exp. Darkpaw's Triloun Champions actually had a larger bonus at 25%. This very much looks like Sony or Darkpaw nerfed at least the deeper area mobs at some point. Several mobs in the zone have very not-round multipliers which look like they may have been reduced algorithmically and that may also explain the hraquis giving less than baseline. My Al'Kabor logs show that level 66+ PoWater NPCs had bonus exp similar to the doomfire flameheads, and possibly as much as +100% for the regrua. A comment in the above link also agrees with this. I think old EQ's hraquis mobs may have awarded less than the regrua like Darkpaw's but still elevated way above baseline.

An AK log shows no bonus Triloun area mobs, but an early 2003 log seemed to indicate (it's just a group comment in a log, which are unreliable) the front area mobs having a bonus. I could not find old forum posts to corroborate a front area bonus however so this is very uncertain. On Darkpaw servers the large piranha actually had 25% LESS exp than baseline, which is another mob in a water zone giving less than the typical experience amount. This also suggests to me that Sony/Darkpaw nerfed the exp for many of the NPCs in the zone at some point and perhaps made some errors in the process.

I checked several rare/named NPCs in both PoFire and PoWater and all but one had larger bonuses than the nearby common NPCs and sometimes much larger. The level 61 trap mobs in PoWater awarded reduced experience as you might expect, as I got exactly half the baseline exp from them. These weaker trap NPCs may have been a motive to add this individual NPC type exp adjustment option.

Darkpaw's Plane of Earth A mobs all seem to have +20% modifiers, except the level 46 spawns from armadillos. I checked AK logs to see if this zone awarded more exp than expected and I can confirm they did award a lot more. An AK log I have clearly shows kills granting 7% in a 5 man group. The best fit multiplier estimate from this log data is +50%. Darkpaw's Plane of Earth B mobs in fact have 50% multipliers, so it appears as though they once both had 50%. I also found three old Steel Warrior forum threads mentioning EarthA's higher exp rate:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030317...cID=2911.topic
https://web.archive.org/web/20030710...cID=1844.topic
https://web.archive.org/web/20050313...hp/t-2315.html

On Al'Kabor it was known that the level 60 frogs in the Plane of Storms were unusually good exp. Zamiel's thread has exp data for these mobs, and it shows a 30% experience bonus for them. However there are two different kinds: the forest area frogs (loroks) and the center cave frogs (tempest toads, amphans). The lorok frogs don't summon and are weaker but they had this 30% bonus along with the cave frogs in old EQ. On Darkpaw servers only the center cave frogs have this 30% bonus multiplier. So Sony nerfed the loroks at some unknown point. The level 61 versions in the zone-out cave are weaker and have no bonus.

This post from June 2003 seems to indicate that they still had the bonus then since it says 6% with no charm reduction: https://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-475.html

I found contradictory evidence of the giants in PoStorms having a bonus multiplier of 40%. Darkpaw's PoStorms level 62 giants have a 40% bonus on them and the above link also seems to indicate that this was in from early PoP as it says 10-11% for a solo giant kill, which is quite a bit and the math comes out to about 10.78% if you apply a 40% bonus. However I found a comment in a AK log of a group of 5 getting 5% for a giant kill, and 4.8% is what they would grant there with no bonus. Another AK comment says "two blue bars" (8%) solo. Also the lack of any log chatter about them being good exp suggests that they weren't on AK. There is lots of chatter about the frogs. It's possible Sony was adjusting these multipliers throughout the expansion and that's why AK lacked some.

The only Darkpaw mobs outside of elemental planes and Storms that I discovered with a bonus multiplier were some Crypt of Decay mobs. Tactics mobs did not have any that I found. I only checked about 140 NPC types however.

Supposedly the 'a metallic slime' mob in Plane of Innovation awarded a lot of exp at some point. I found this comment on Allakhazam: (Prathun was a Darkpaw dev)

"Prathun in the eqplayers forum about easter eggs in everquest said this slime is worth way more xp than normal mobs."
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/...77286247065402

But when I killed a metallic slime on Darkpaw servers I did not notice any bonus experience from it. They seem to have nerfed it but I can't see why they would have.

My spreadsheet lists the NPCs I checked for bonus exp on Darkpaw servers.

The PBAoE Reduction/Nerf

When I was trying to figure out EQ's experience logic for TAKP, a few things threw me off for awhile and delayed my understanding it. One of these things was a PBAoE nerf Sony put in some time during Luclin. TAKP had the incorrect AA exp amount for a couple of years because of this. We incorrectly had it at 24m because that is level 51's exp required (a false rumor that was often repeated) and my Fungus Grove logs (I AoEd that zone A LOT) had AA estimates well above even 24m which didn't make sense, and I couldn't fix our AA amount without the numbers making sense. So my adding up kills wasn't giving me correct answer to the AA amount. Later I stumbled upon the old ShowEQ threads which allowed me to complete the puzzle.

I made videos of my boxed AoEing which are on YouTube. One video shows a kill count and the amount of exp gained. If you do the math, the exp progress in the bar is less than expected. An AA being 18.75m exp is proven beyond any doubt so the only possibility is some kind of reduction for PBAoE. I checked for this in other zones I had PBAoEd in and I also found it in my Grimling Forest, Karnor's Castle and PoNightmare logs so it wasn't specific to Luclin zones.

However my Plane of Valor logs did not have any reduction. Also my Grimling Forest logs showed no reduction until level 42, and it was small at 42 but the reduction increased for each level gained, ending in a 60% reduction at level 50. Grimling Forest miners were level 35-39. This suggests that the reduction did not kick in for mobs near your level. My Plane of Nightmare log showed a smaller reduction of about 27% compared to Fungus Grove at the same level, which was 40%. My Karnor's log at level 50 had a smaller reduction (23%) compared to the Grimling Forest log of the same level. This suggests that the reduction increased the lower the level of the mob from the player.

I found another exception to this nerf: when I powerleveled my magician on Al'Kabor, I didn't group him with anybody and did not abuse the out of range group exploit. He was entirely solo. His experience was not reduced when I PBAoEed with him. It seems this nerf was only applied in groups.

I also have personal AoE logs from Acrylia Caverns in January 2002 and Fungus Grove after GoD launched in 2004. Both of these logs showed no reduction in exp. So presumably Sony nerfed AoE some time after January 2002 then removed the nerf some time during PoP. Either that or this was a nerf custom to Al'Kabor which seems unlikely.

I could not find any mention of a AoE exp nerf in Usenet or eqarchives.org. A 40% reduction in exp gained would theoretically be noticed and mentioned somewhere, but the archived posts are a tiny fraction of the posts that existed at the time so it's certainly possible they existed and were lost. It's possible this nerf was put in late Luclin and the increased exp from high level kills took over as the best exp so players just didn't notice or care about the nerf. I've seen players miss things that were more obvious than this so I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't noticed it. Still I find it troubling that I have found no mention of it. The math is irrefutable that it existed on Al'Kabor.

I did find some comments on Project 1999's forum but they carry very little weight as they are 12 years after the fact and very vague:

"aoe groups where nerfed 3 months into luclin, and mainly in luclin areas. shit is classic sadly."
"Fungus was harder due to the exp nerf and the mobs who shroom you"
https://www.project1999.com/forums/a.../t-156004.html

Sony did nerf AoE in other ways however, and this shows motive. Days after Luclin launched, Sony patched The Grey to specifically nerf AoE groups:

Quote:

December 12, 2001 12:00 am

- Made several gameplay changes to The Grey. A single group having the
ability to simultaneously engage and prevail against 35+ experience-
giving creatures is not in line with the desire for risk vs. reward and
the promotion of balanced groups.

Sony increased MR on the NPCs, increased their HP and put in some magic immune mobs in that patch.
This old thread explains what the nerfs in The Grey were and includes Sony dev commentary: https://web.archive.org/web/20020715...cID=1160.topic

Later Sony raised the respawn timers in Acrylia Caverns and put magic resistant mobs in there as well so color stuns would not work on them. This May 2002 thread mentions the nerfs to AC: https://web.archive.org/web/20020602...rt=81&stop=100

So Sony had a history of nerfing AoE during Luclin. This makes an AoE exp reduction very plausible as Sony's other nerfs were not curbing the practice very much. It's also plausible for them to not have mentioned it because I can't find mention of the AC nerfs from Sony sources and they got so much flak after nerfing The Grey. I mention this because I got a lot of flak for nerfing AoE on TAKP and players simply wouldn't believe me that the reduction existed even with the numbers put in front of them and videos of AoE groups on Al'Kabor showing the exp rate, as if Sony wouldn't have done such a thing.