Defense-related skills

Serica

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Harena Serica Turbinis
A question arose on EF a few days ago, after Neil Stockton referred to mobs being 'sucked dry' of defense skills and dumped.

At first I thought he was simply con-joining limited defense-skills/mob with limited sweat/mob, however I did some searches here on PCF and found threads posted after the 2007/2008 defense-skill nerf like these:
https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forums/showthread.php?136296-Skills-stop-after-x-minutes (2008)
https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...s-and-health&p=2547296&viewfull=1#post2547296 (2010)
These indicated that while defensive skills for a player stop after a couple of minutes, they could be 're-set' by any player activity like shooting or sweating. Fishface confirmed in conversation that (before he moved to space-flights) he'd skill evade by shooting a baby trox very slowly with an Opalo in order to keep the skills flowing for 'hours'.

The only thread I could find that indicated any differently was from October 2012 (https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...2819-no-skills-for-pilot-in-the-training-area), where Aliana advised that defense skills from space mobs could NOT be reset. However, there were responses there still indicating that shooting might still re-set the defense skills for planet-based mobs.

Neil however apparently noticed the change in space mobs and defense skills last year, not long after they were introduced in June 2011, and on testing it on-planet himself sometime after that, and had found that it's no longer possible for defensive skills to be re-set on planet-based mobs either.

He and I both did some limited testing to verify that this is in fact still the case (in his case on Carabok, on mine with Molisk .. results in this thread on EF: https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forum/skills/204992-there-max-skill-gains-mob-2.html

I'm curious whether anyone can pin down just when this was introduced as a bug-fix (or nerf), as I haven't been able to find anything in the VU release notes about this change.

---------------------------

Another thing Neil mentioned in conversation related to gaining piloting skills while on-planet. Apparently if you happen to be flying over a Scoria hunter when the scoria does an area-of-effect attack, the pilot will gain the sorts of piloting defense skills normally only gained in space. I tend to tp around on planet rather than fly a quad, but I certainly don't recall ever getting any piloting skills while on Calypso, nor do I recall anyone else mentioning it.
Anyone else notice this happen and care to elaborate ?
Do we have any area-of-effect mobs in non-pvp zones on Calypso, where this can be tested?
 
Very Interesting about the Scoria, never knew that :) Will be interesting to hear of further research on this.

My quote was only in regards to space mobs and the skills they give, I have absolutely no idea how it works with planets based mobs as I only ever killed them and not suck the skills from them :)

From the other thread I had mentioned -

Once a Pilot has sucked all the skills from a mob, if they switch to a different pilot, the new pilot will not get skills. Also if the mob switches to another ship, it no longer gives the new ships pilot skills.

We have tested this alot, hunting large groups of space mobs, once no more skillls are gleened, swapping pilots - makes no diffference. Also one mothership has passed a whole group of mobs (30+) to another mothership , and the new mothership pilot still does now get any skills.

It really seems the mobs dry up, so unless they are shot down, it might cause this issue.

( The op's issue on that thread im referring to is him getting no skills from space mobs, the solution being they may have been previously sucked dry and dumped)

This is related to gathering huge groups of mobs with a mothership, eventually they will stop giving the pilot skills and need to be killed off ( or dumped as some do).


So far we we have yet to find a way in which mobs can be "reset" in space. Otherswise the ships would have no need to collect, just reset the same couple of mobs over and over ( poor slave mobbies :laugh:). We know that changing pilot wont reset skills, firing some shots wont, swapping ships wont, allowing mobs to go out of sight and de-aggrrod wont...


Sorry.. ive rambled about space and that wasnt the question :ahh:

So is it believed that it was possible to reset planet based mobs skills, however after space mobs were introduced this was taken away?



Alaina :)
 
...
So is it believed that it was possible to reset planet based mobs skills, however after space mobs were introduced this was taken away?

Alaina :)

That's pretty much the size of it, yes. I'm guessing it happened when spacemobs were first introduced in June2011, or fairly shortly thereafter, but can't find anything yet to confirm that.
 
Very Interesting about the Scoria, never knew that :) Will be interesting to hear of further research on this.

My quote was only in regards to space mobs and the skills they give, I have absolutely no idea how it works with planets based mobs as I only ever killed them and not suck the skills from them :)

From the other thread I had mentioned -



( The op's issue on that thread im referring to is him getting no skills from space mobs, the solution being they may have been previously sucked dry and dumped)

This is related to gathering huge groups of mobs with a mothership, eventually they will stop giving the pilot skills and need to be killed off ( or dumped as some do).


So far we we have yet to find a way in which mobs can be "reset" in space. Otherswise the ships would have no need to collect, just reset the same couple of mobs over and over ( poor slave mobbies :laugh:). We know that changing pilot wont reset skills, firing some shots wont, swapping ships wont, allowing mobs to go out of sight and de-aggrrod wont...


Sorry.. ive rambled about space and that wasnt the question :ahh:

So is it believed that it was possible to reset planet based mobs skills, however after space mobs were introduced this was taken away?



Alaina :)

I were at least possible to reset planet-mobs, but that has probably been changed, yes.
 
Another thing Neil mentioned in conversation related to gaining piloting skills while on-planet. Apparently if you happen to be flying over a Scoria hunter when the scoria does an area-of-effect attack, the pilot will gain the sorts of piloting defense skills normally only gained in space. I tend to tp around on planet rather than fly a quad, but I certainly don't recall ever getting any piloting skills while on Calypso, nor do I recall anyone else mentioning it.
Anyone else notice this happen and care to elaborate ?
Do we have any area-of-effect mobs in non-pvp zones on Calypso, where this can be tested?

I believe you can get piloting skills simply from being shot at in pvp zone - and have seen reports of such - while in the driver seat of a flying vehicle, planet vs space does not matter. I don't know if thruster capable vs not (or thruster on vs not) makes a difference. If non-space mobs aggroed on flying vehicles on Calypso, we would get pilot skills from there too, I believe.
 
You do gain pilot skills while taking damage in a pvp zone when in a sleip or quad. Makes sense that when taking damage from an aoe mob you gain pilot skills as well...never thought to try that before.
 
Sorry i'm late to the party. In response to your question Serica, I did not ever test how defensive skillgains from mobs could be regenerated pre-VU10, but in doing some tests on hit rate i think i relied on the common wisdom of the time that was fairly easy to observe:

If a mob stood in a forest, and nobody was around, would the server remember its skill allotment?

(With the answer presumably being "no".) However, whether it was a time-based or radar-based phenomenon, i don't on my own experience know.

It appears that mobs may not ever recover their skill allotment now:
https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forum/2592585-post16.html

This is obviously an important point for anyone who cares about skills. It's unfortunate that exploitation has led to these kinds of artificial limits that could inadvertently penalize certain types of honest play.
 
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