Info and Summary on the 2013 Skill Nerf

Spinaltapper

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I'd like to start by saying I very rarely post something on the forums but since this VU created a dramatic change in my hunting of small creatures I decided I would shed some light on it since the original topic was locked before I could. So here is a copy (slightly updated) of my post from the Arkadia forums on the matter.

I know you guys are sick of hearing about carabok but after a few hundred ped cycled the skillgains have clearly decreased by about 60-65%. During the last year when cycling 100 ped on carabok the TT skill returns have been 16-17% of what was cycled. Since the patch cycling 100 ped now yields only 6-7% TT skill returns. This is a massive difference. Whether it is related to mob level or something else I can not say since I am not a developer. A friend and I have also done some testing on other small mobs such as Calypso Puny (lvl reduced from 1/2/3 to all 1) and Halix (lvl 9 to lvl 4). They all have had a decrease in TT skill returns as well.

As mobs increase in health the changes are less noticeable in the skillgain returns. This is no surprise since as mob health increases, skills per ped spent decreases (due to fewer kill bonus green lines). EU has always been this way. So mobs with 500 health may only give 2% TT return on skills for 1000 ped cycled and post-lvl decrease may give only 1.95%. This is why people are noticing the nerf mainly while hunting small (10-100 health) creatures and hardly at all when hunting larger prey. If you only hunt mobs with higher health it will be unlikely that you will see any difference in your skillgains this patch.

However, since almost every mob in the entire game on every planet has had its level reduced and skillgains have decreased on every mob we have tested so far it shows a rather strong correlation that mob level Does in fact effect skillgain contrary to what [Chris l Arkadia] has said (on the Ark forums where this was first posted). Mindark has nerfed skillgains in hunting this patch and in the past the entire game across the board so I can't say I'm terribly surprised by this. It is disconcerting though when representatives of Mindark say nothing related to skillgains while hunting has changed when analysis of TT value of skills proves otherwise.

Even though this has greatly effected my gameplay I am not going to stop playing or sit around and complain about it all day. This post was simply to try and provide an objective viewpoint of over 6 years of hunting critters with less than 100 health and nothing else. Being a non-depositor puny mobs give me the most bang for the buck in playtime and fun so that being said it is time to login and get hunting!
 
6-7% is still to much compared to normal(1-2%) mobs
 
However, since almost every mob in the entire game on every planet has had its level reduced

I don't think that's really true. Seems the change mainly affected high regen mobs, and very small mobs.

It's not exactly a secret that mob level was a pretty useless measure of the actual difficulty of a mob. So whilst it's unfortunate for some, particularly Carabok skillers, others could easily argue it's a bug-fix rather than a skill nerf.
 
Well I did say "almost" every mob. There were a couple that had increases in level though those are few in number. Regardless though every mob that did have its level decreased also had a skillgain decrease. Caraboks I would agree with you and say is more of a bug fix that I expected for a long time. However for every other small mob that gave normal skillgains it is simply a nerf.
 
It's a very good move by MA and a welcome one.

From my understanding what they seem to have done is standardize mobs and skillgains across the platform and on all planets. Prior to this change how mobs gave skills must have been quite different and open to "abuse". After seeing the RT mob giving extremely high skills gains, this was a mob around 60-100hp, I must have been to blame because I suggested a 1000 hp mob be created which also had this generous feature. Perhaps Ark took note of this RT mob and created their own version? The carabok.

Carabok and the RT mob were anomalies in that they were extremely generous in giving out skills. Now that they have been standardized I would imagine they do give less skills.

However, it's only a matter of time before PP's figure out a new way to abuse something or another and then MindArk will have to go and fix it.


We've seen PP's abuse item drops, skills, bp's etc...

MindArk perhaps need to be more proactive and standardize everything so as to reduce abuse by PP's. For example at the moment we have Jarhead armour destabilizing mid level armour as it has dropped from bp's more than the market can bear. Certainly more than the requirements of RT's native player base population. I for one would welcome a fix for this. No doubt someone enjoying almost "free" mid level armour will complain.

On Arkadia we have furniture and texture abuse. Furniture unlimited bp's drop like rain and are easy to craft. Thus flooding the market with cheap Arkadia furniture. Arkadia also has cheap simulated black and red which previously were harder to come by. I for one would also welcome this being also fixed. Again people enjoying these would probably complain.


Also perhaps MindArk should place fines on PP's. If they abuse something too many times there should be some kind of penalty for them otherwise they seem to be abusing one thing after another.
 
16% ? That is atrocious. And people were complaining about missions reducing the value of skills...
 
I agree with you on a lot of that post George. Carabok were indeed an anomaly which is why I agreed with Jimmy as well that they were more of a bug fix rather than a nerf ;) It also seems MA has been standardizing more things lately such as the changes to the mission rewards stating all PP had to follow guidelines especially with the IC/IFN missions. So I think MA seems to be realizing some of the things you suggested in your post George and may be working towards standards in other aspects of the game as well.
 
According to some people, this did not happen. There was no drop in skill gain and it is all just lies from MA haters...

And some of you are gluttons for punishment. Carabok changing is understandable. Other more normal health mobs had their mob levels drop 20-40%. This corresponds to a big drop in skill gain when hunting mobs such as Frescoquda, Furor, Kreltin, Aurli and any other mobs that regened relatively fast. Is that what you want? High regen mobs compared to low regen mobs require more ped to kill (obviously), a higher dps weapon that usually means less eco, they make use of a finisher problematic, etc. They should have higher mob levels imo. On top of that, while many mobs had big cuts in mob level, we only got very small mob level increases for others. Where is the balance there? Initially I thought maybe mobs that hit for high damage would have their level increased, but was disappointed there.
 
Although i have yet to test out my skill gains on these 'nerfed' mobs and having only read opinions on this matter, as i see things, this is a good move on part of MA.
If skill gains have in fact gone down, the value of skills should go up. This makes me happy since for some time now many moves on part of MA/pp have devalued our avas. I think this is also a way to get players doing more missions (mainly iron/bronze) for those extra skills which i once again see as a good move.
In general i aprove of most 'improvments' MA has put forth in these last VUs, many of which get called 'nerfs'.

I guess most of the time it just comes down to each indeviduals perspective i guess.

Just my 2 pecs :)

Austro
 
Xen if you or anyone else have pre and post skillgain tracking in terms of TT value of skills vs. ped cycled I'd enjoying hearing some of the stats. I'm curious to see if it is a really noticeable difference of say 3% vs. 1% or if it is something most people may not even notice like 3% vs. 2.85%. Granted on the big mobs when you cycle 2000-5000 ped/day that .15% can still be quite a large difference in total skills gained especially when multiplied over weeks and months of hunting. I also agree it doesn't make sense that high health, high regen, hard hitting mobs would have their levels reduced. Unless like the carabok all of those mobs also had grossly over-stated levels and the new levels do in fact bring things in line with the new standard for what determines a mobs level.
 
Finally a thread worthy of the topic, I can enjoy reading. Thanks Tapper +rep.

Well whether or not skillgains have a correlation to a Mobs L rating & this means less skills is irrelevant to me. A simple solution would for me would be to hunt a mob with a higher maturity, that will have a higher L rating. Or you can simply hunt, higher level mob that you can handle almost all the time & you have steady TT gains.

If that isn't enough we still have quest rewards to contend with, such as scips, aurli, proteron & such etc. Personally I don't see this as a nerf but more of a balancing out phase. If this makes ppl unhappy, adjust self.


~Mark~
 
I've been tracking my skills for the last couple of days (ok years) on Arkadia and found that the skills have dropped about 50% more or less. This may suck but also what I found is that the skills have gone down to the level of what I once got on Calypso. So the question here is if skills have gone down on Calypso as well. If they are about the same then MA just fixed other planet side skilling. If People are finding that skilling is bad on Calypso as well, then we do have a nerf.

BTW, I'll post my daily update chart here if all would like to see the skills...
 
I remember being pissed off as a noob, when they changed the sweating to those dew-hickey sweat guns.

Before those things you could sweat a small critter dry before they would agro on you. So I was able to swunt snables at a small profit.

But with those gunny thingamabobs, they jump on you immediately. So my profits went bye bye.

Things change around here, deal with it.
 
Entropia is DYNAMIC
 
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I've been tracking my skills for the last couple of days (ok years) on Arkadia and found that the skills have dropped about 50% more or less. This may suck but also what I found is that the skills have gone down to the level of what I once got on Calypso. So the question here is if skills have gone down on Calypso as well. If they are about the same then MA just fixed other planet side skilling. If People are finding that skilling is bad on Calypso as well, then we do have a nerf.

BTW, I'll post my daily update chart here if all would like to see the skills...

Planet is irrelevant. They can't just make one planet give much more skill than another, it would be easy to spot and other planets would have a fit. Mob level determines skill gain. Mob levels were not assigned manually, they were determined by a formula, that is obvious because all high regen mobs had a higher level/health ratio.

I'll have some test results later today...
 
Looking forward to seeing some of your test results Oz and Xen!
 
Planet is irrelevant. They can't just make one planet give much more skill than another, it would be easy to spot and other planets would have a fit. Mob level determines skill gain. Mob levels were not assigned manually, they were determined by a formula, that is obvious because all high regen mobs had a higher level/health ratio.

I'll have some test results later today...

dailyskills.png


Here's my skills chart again since I started way back on 9/24/2011 and this chart is updated daily so you will be able to come back to this page and see the changes day by day. About the time I started recording my daily skills I moved off Calypso to Next Island and Arkadia and then moved back to Calypso for a while. After a bit I moved back to Arkadia and have been there ever since due to the great skilling and IFN missions.

Now if you look at my skills you can probably guess when it was I was on Calypso. If you look at the very end of the chart which again will change here day to day, you can see that the skills have dropped dramatically. The question is, has it changed for all planets or just Arkadia? I'm here today on Calypso to do a test skill run to see.

I'm guessing, hoping, that it's only Planet Partners that have changed..but if it is all planets I'm guessing my skills of around 100 a day should be about 50. If I find that the skills here on Calypso is still at around 100 then well, it's just the other planets coming inline with Calypso.

BTW, in the hunting today, I have seen little to no evade other than a lot of evade missing :laugh:
 
That is a pretty sweet graph. What software are you using to create that? Is it a combination of jdegre skill scanner and excel? Or something completely different that you use to track skills?
 
Mobs seem to be evading more than ever, on 10/10 SIB guns. Amount of skill per ped used has been reduced on many, many mobs. Many of those same mobs that have had level reduced actually hit harder and more often now, increasing decay cost. But wait... they got rid of the 1 pec armour decay when equipping.

This VU will cause many people to stop hunting, its already by far the most shafted section of the game and the one they seem to care about the least as it generates the least amount of cycled PED compared to the other two.

The carrot dangled in front of lots of rich and uneco players that their HA on unlimited guns has gone from 4.5 to 6 will please a few, and caraboks were indeed overskilled. The rest of it is pure arse-poundingly poor. Unless you like arse pounding. In which case... hi a/s/l?

I see the VU like 1 step forward but about 3-4 steps back. If anyone really truly sees this as the good outweighing the bad, then you have more peds than I do. I depo a decent amount but increasingly MA is cutting the margin so that instead of cutting even, I'm lucky to get away with a small loss. I really hope the real world economy improves and we see genuine improvements that benefit the hunters start to happen again as their profits return. Each VU we lose more and more hunting depositers and if one area of the game becomes unsustainable, which i doubt its far off, then it'll have a knock-on effect.

The only silver lining will be if real world forecasts improve, the European economy does and hunters start to get a bit back, rather than the profit margin increasing whilst thinly slicing away at our ability to enjoy the game time after time. New facial features is not a sound enough filler to paste over the cracks. That's it, I cannot think of any more clichés.
 
is it bad or good to have 650k skills after nerf like this??? :scratch2:
 
That is a pretty sweet graph. What software are you using to create that? Is it a combination of jdegre skill scanner and excel? Or something completely different that you use to track skills?

Yes, been using good old Excel and skill scanner daily. It's been kind of fun.

Did my test run on Calypso yesterday and found skilling to be......About the same as it always was on Calypso -- for me. Hunting my low level mobs, Merps, Cornundacauda and my most favorite mob (Punys) I got a total of 63.52 skill points. Now it may seem low, but this is on average what I always got here on Calypso for the type of hunting I've been doing the last year. At the end I sure hope this is a nerf that MA will fix..but again, I can see what the may be doing with the PP planets..the only problem is..if they do this..Arkadia will no longer be known as the Skilling planet to get new players to go and spend a lot of money to skill up. (ok, ok, the idea).
 
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