 | Hello again! It’s me, the leveling roulette person. After an encouraging amount of interest to my previous preliminary thread here and ingame, I have been able to gather a lot more data. While it’s still far from complete (more about that later), it’s far enough along to share some more polished insights. Why are we doing this again?Who doesn’t love poking at black box mechanics in decade-plus running MMOs? More practically, have you ever wondered whether it’s better to get low level dungeons with a high roulette bonus or a higher level dungeon with better instance EXP? Ever felt like leveling at a particular range just flew on by when other times it felt like a slow grind? On the way to almost-omni 100 DoW/M I often got the sense that the net outcomes of all these things were not quite equal. So after much occasional wondering, I figured I should start writing things down. MethodThe ingame description states as follows: In other words, there are said to be two explanatory variables: the level of the player, and (the (minimum) level of) the instance. Supposedly these determine the roulette EXP bonus in a two-step process, but there are too many unknowns to try and unravel the specifics of that. Additionally, it’s not mentioned whether player level is considered at the start or at the end (when daily bonus availability is checked) of an instance; it’s commonly held, and stated on the consolegames wiki that starting level is what matters here, so we’ll go with that. As such, our approach is to check the roulette bonus outcome at most if not all permutations of player starting level (16 through 99) vs. instance (Sastasha & Tam-Tara all the way up to Sastasha through Origenics). That’s a total of 1669 permutations. Just as an arbitrary guesstimate, I think it will take >50% coverage to reveal key trends in satisfactory detail, averaging data for every other level across all instances; in practice, some will be covered better and some worse. On top of that, a healthy number of replicates – covering the same permutation more than once – is desirable to add robustness against the occasional error. They might also help to shed some light on other variables that may be at play (spoiler: it looks that way). With regard to math and units: it’s mostly straightforward. First there is the roulette bonus, determined by player level at the start of an instance and the instance in question. To the best of my (current) knowledge, it is not subject to any EXP buffing effects that the player may have. Next there is the instance EXP, a fixed base value of EXP awarded after killing bosses in a dungeon or just the one primal in case of Ifrit/Titan/Garuda. For example, the base instance EXP of the Great Gubal Library is 177,598 (the sum of its three bosses, worth 35,520, 62,159 and 79,919). While the base value is fixed, it can be variably buffed by the player; a value of +200% is used throughout this post, which corresponds roughly to 100% armoury bonus, 50% rested, 30% CE earrings and 15% FC III / squadron bonus (in reality not everything stacks purely additively, but this is a close enough approximation). In most graphs these two EXP sources are summed together, then expressed as a percentage of EXP required for a player’s next level, at a given level. Now, let’s get to work. Figure 1a Figure 1b ProgressAt the time of this writing I’ve gathered a total of 436 datapoints, covering 361 (21.63%) unique permutations (figure 1a). Of that total 239 were gathered by myself ‘in person’, 100 were submitted through a webform by numerous players (figure 1b), and an additional 97 belong to a dataset previously gathered by /u/VG896 – thank you to all those who have helped so far! Figure 2a Figure 2b Figure 2c Shifting trends in net outcomes; poor rewards from ARR primalsIt will come as no surprise to most that pre-50 leveling goes very quickly. Including instance EXP at +200% buffing (used throughout this post), almost every permutation recorded to date nets you comfortably >100% of EXP to next level. The exceptions to this are invariably the primal trio of Ifrit, Titan & Garuda (figure 2a-b). The reason for this is their near-total lack of instance EXP, and roulette bonuses that don’t make up for it (figure 2c). Naturally their quick kill time improves this a little, but if you are only going to do a single daily roulette run (and others, but no major grinding) these few saved minutes aren’t a benefit in practice, and spending significant time in queue beforehand wipes them out entirely. Net outcomes drop massively at 50 with a further decline through 60, then staying at a roughly similar level until 80. There seem to be slight shifts within each 10-level bracket; a rise at the start followed by a steady decline. These (and all summary statistics / graph elements) should still be interpreted with a heavy grain of salt for the time being, though. What is much clearer is that higher level dungeons with their lower roulette bonuses work out noticeably better than lower dungeons with bigger bonuses. Limited leveling roulette fans rejoice! These trends mostly hold from 80 onwards, when EXP across the board jumps considerably before another steady decline towards 100. In the 91-100 range at-level dungeons are harmed by instance EXP buffs falling to 120% (armoury bonus drops from 100% to 50% and 30% CE earrings stop working), but they are nevertheless the best you can get. Figure 3 (zoom in; WAY in!) Roulette bonus is not a continuous function of player level & instanceAs a sharp-eyed reader you may have noticed a sawtooth-like pattern in some of the more densely populated ranges of figure 2b. Figure 2c further makes clear that that originates from the roulette bonus, especially when instance EXP isn’t meaningfully there to smooth it out. In fact, this pattern emerges because the roulette bonus from a given instance appears to stay constant for 2, sometimes 3 player levels at a time while the player’s required EXP to next level steadily increases every level (figure 3; bring your magnifying glass!) This seems to happen mostly as odd-even pairs (e.g. 93-94), excluding those where the even level is an expansion cap. Additionally, roulette bonus values up to and including player level 80 are almost exclusively (287/292) ‘clean’ multiples of 50. We might take this to be the result of some rounding. However, that would be mostly pointless – many other sources give the player not so nicely rounded EXP values anyway – and seems especially unlikely given that bonus very regularly are not multiples of 50. In my view, all of these values are probably constants, newly set by SE for every new expansion. The trend toward multiples of 50 before EW levels may reflect a consequence or artifact of the EXP squish at that time, or simply a preference of whoever was in charge of these numbers for nicely round values that followed their true guideline calculation. Maybe both. Either way, for it to all come down to ever-expanding lookup tables would not be out of place. Is there another variable that influences roulette bonuses?It’s hard to say at this time, but it seems at least plausible. Looking again at figure 3, there are a fair number of cases where two different bonus values appear at the same permutation of player level vs. instance. Some look fairly likely to be typos, but there are also a number that don’t look anything like their counterpart and can’t be easily dismissed as being mistaken for another EXP source. However, these have only ever been two different values, not three or more, and in none of these cases have both values been made more credible by additional exact replicates. This raises the possibility that they are just errors, but the sheer number of occurrences does leave me unsure. Equally puzzling is a second kind of pattern, where the absolute roulette bonus dips after having sat higher at a lower player level. Several of these cases have had at least one more exact replicate to back them up. That said, I can’t readily think of a reason why it would make sense for a player to receive outright less EXP as their level increases. We might for a moment assume that either or both of these are true effects, that won’t just neatly resolve to a single sensible value per permutation as more data comes in. What other variables would we consider? Clear time is a common suggestion, and not unthinkable, looking at the ARR primal trio. But in their case this has resulted in low bonuses across the entire player level range, and they themselves are not immune to the above patterns. Continuous scaling to individual groups’ clear times, or really any variable, seems increasingly unlikely as some permutations stack up 3+ exact replicates of the same bonus value. Is there some categorical factor per individual player, maybe? Role might seem plausible, but what reason would there be for a semi-hidden added modifier when the adventurer in need bonus already exists (negligible as it is for EXP)? It is at least easy to track, so going forward I’ve included it on the form. As for more possibilities, the road to 90 buff? One player with that buff is an example of the absolute EXP dip; 52 vs. Ifrit, which seems contradictory. What point would there be in penalizing these players’ roulette bonuses as a weird exception to that being an otherwise unmodifiable source, when they’re still having their instance EXP being buffed sky high at the same time? All we can do for now is speculate... What’s next?I’d like to think we’ve reached some nice low-hanging fruit here. For the more difficult questions, things need to scale, the more the better. And thus we come to the pitch: Setting this up during some time off has been a lot of fun, and I aim to maintain & refine these analyses as long as the data flows. The data grind, however, is not something I can keep up to this degree. I need your help! Many hands make light work. Do you still have jobs to level? No rush, just the one roulette a day if you’re feeling like it. And when you do, take a minute to share your results: https://forms.gle/ne8Kks3pEABpJnys9 Do:
Don’t:
Let’s crack this black box together bro! submitted by /u/Unhappy-Raisin3105 [link] [comments] |
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