This is an interesting topic and I'm in the mood... so I'll tell u a story.
This is a true story. It's from another game but it might shed some light on how the things described by Rick
might be possible and how it all
might work under the hood. This another game was pretty much a clone of the early PE: AfterWorld Alpha (AW).
(Hope the mods won't mind the examples from another game that's long dead and gone so there's no danger we could possibly lure any players away from EU).
All the main game mechanics in AW were the same as in PE/EU but there was one important difference. In EU almost the entire game's non-PvP, only small areas PvP. In AW the picture was reversed, almost all the game PvP with only small areas non-PvP. As a result, there was constant wars between (alliances of) soces.
What was, again, similar to EU - it was relatively easy for the high level player to kill a newcomer or a medium lvl player but very difficult if the skill levels and gear was more or less equal. Try to kill someone with supremacy and a good fap in 1 vs 1 battle... If he knows how to move and doesn't just stand there like sitting duck u will never succeed. All the same was true for AW.
OK, one picture is better than 100 words. There's a short (~2 min) video below.
It starts with the biggest and meanest mobs in AW (Drone-29), then we can see a (failed) attempt to overkill a mob (team vs team). About @1:20 we can see 2 Vs. 1 PvP battle between equal opponents (all 3 belong to absolute Top10 skill-wise and have the best gear in the game).
(As you can see, it's pretty much impossible to kill an equal opponent in PvP...)
And then one day all we knew about the game flew out of the window.
There was no seamless world in AW, each server was a separate map. On the server border you were transferred to the next map/server.
There was 3 of us that day. We had just arrived to some godforsaken distant map(/server) in the middle of nowhere and by a coincidence 2 of our greatest adversaries arrived to the exact same spot just a few minutes later.
It wasn't an ambush, both sides were caught by a surprise. The shootout that followed was fierce and short, 1st enemy went down almost instantly, 2nd one followed shortly.
WTF just happened? Why did they go down so fast? Maybe they didn't have their PvP armors on? (It wasn't possible to tell in AW, you could make Pixie look like Supremacy, and vice versa). Or maybe we just scored some lucky crits?
Next day we read on the forum we were using some hack. It turned out they did have their best PvP armors on, and the logs showed that we didn't score any more crits than usual. Instead, the log showed we simply delivered the max normal damage
with every single shot. Which was not statistically possible in AW (cuz unlike EU in AW the defensive skills decreased the incoming damage, not just less successful hits but every hit delivered less damage for a player with high defensive skills).
So, obviously something extraordinary had happened.
For this battle those 2 ubers had reverted back to total noobs. No wonder they were furious and suspected we had used some hack or cheating somehow... But none of us had used any hacks or tricks.
After series of tests we finally figured it out. When avatar was entering the game the skillsystem initialized properly (skillsystem 1st, then the 3D model of the avatar, then the hitbox was enabled).
When you moved from one server to another, however, avatar and it's hitbox sometimes materialized
before the skillsystem was properly initialized. Without skill data the engine reverted back to defaults - a skillset of the newcomer when he 1st enters the game.
* * *
I don't know what exactly happened in the OP's example, but it
seems to point to something similar - some kind of glitch in the system.
The conclusion that Rick draws from this, however, is wrong IMO. There's loads of evidence that the skillsystem in general is working exactly as it should, i.e.:
Since I passed the evade requirement for troxes they are just dancing around me but they don't hit, almost not at all. It doesn't matter how long I hunt them. Even if they eventually manage to crit me, my skills still won't change. The troxes still just dance around me and hardly ever hit...
I chose the example of troxes cuz they have very sharp and noticeable reaction to the evader lvl. Just a little bit below the required lvl and u being hit constantly, just a little bit above and your almost like in God-mode.
If your skills were really changing, even a small change would have drastic consequences. But there's nothing, no change whatsoever.
So yeah, I would dare to assert there has to be some other explanation than "skills are worthless" and "what's the point"...
