How does the

Alternate Experience System work?



For years, adventurers in DragonRealms have complained about certain skills being too repetitive and boring to learn (like mech lore, music lore and appraisal) and other skills simply being nearly impossible to learn (like swimming and foraging). The Alternate Experience System (hereafter referred to as AES) was devised by Zoha to address both these problems. AES was designed to allow adventurers to learn repetitive skills at a reasonable rate, and still have time for hunting, role-playing, etc. For a list of skills covered by AES, type EXP ALTERNATE HELP. To understand AES, there are three features you need to understand: skill timers, number of repetitions until "weary", and experience per action.
  1. Skill Timers - Every time you gain experience in a skill on AES, you add approximately 60 minutes to your timer in that skill, with a maximum of 120 minutes. If you have a timer on any AES skill, you cannot turn off AES. Also, when the timer on a skill clears, it resets the Experience Per Action to maximum (see #3).
  2. # of Repetitions Until "Weary" - Once you use an AES skill a certain amount of times(*), you will get the message "Your mind has grown weary of learning [skill]" and you will learn zero experience from using that skill until your timer for that skill expires. If you use the Wizard Front End, I suggest highlighting that string in a bright color, you don't want to miss it and keep training a skill you are not learning.
  3. Experience Per Action - When you use an AES skill which has a clear timer, you will learn MUCH more experience than normal. Each successive time, the amount you learn will slowly go down, until you eventually get weary and learn zero.
So, for example (note - these numbers are completely made up), the 1st time you use an AES skill you might learn 400% of normal, and then 390% of normal on the second use, then 380%, decreasing by 10% until it is finally down to 0%. The only way to get back to the 400% maximum is to wait until the timer for that skill is COMPLETELY expired. Again, I made those numbers up, I have no idea whether the maximum is 400%, or whether the decrease per repetition is linear, or how many repetitions it takes to get down to 0%. I hope you get the general idea though.

(*) For a while I wondered whether it was a certain number of repetitions or a certain amount of total skill learned that would make you weary. Upon further testing, for most skills I have found the number of repetitions allowed before you are weary is equal to 40. For Mech Lore it is only 30.

The Alternate Experience System is not designed to be beneficial to everyone. Whether or not it will help you greatly depends on your style of training. Personally, I find AES to be such a great help that I never turn it off. I mainly use it for the skills I need to circle (mech lore, music lore and appraisal). I train each of those three skills until the amount of skill I'm learning per repetition is at about normal and then wait for the timers to expire (you don't have to keep training until you get the "weary" message). This way, I'm able to train those three skills for about 45 minutes every 2 hours and still learn them pretty fast.

When deciding whether or not AES is right for you, keep in mind that you can gain more in a skill if you do not use AES and train the skill the whole time. AES gives you half of the experience for one-tenth the effort is what I like to say. Now that you have a better understanding of how AES works, I hope you are able to decide whether AES is right for you.

Thank you, come again.

Back to Mysteries of DragonRealms Explained.