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Experience

Experience is tallied in points and is awarded to the player after they have performed certain tasks. The amount of experience points awarded is presented to the player on their screen as a system message.

Experience granted is only directly relative to the type of task that has just been successfully completed.

See the sub menus below for more details on how to earn experience, and the different types of experience.

Experience Earning

Experience can be granted to you when you successfully do something in a particular skill. For instance, to get Surveying experience, you have to successfully perform a survey for resources. When this is done, you will get a message telling you how much Surveying experience you have been granted. You can't get Pistol experience from using a survey tool; you need to use your pistol in combat.

Different skills require that you earn your experience in different ways. For instance, any of the Artisan professions, (crafters), only get part of their experience from actual crafting. The remainder of their experience is granted to them slowly over time, as their item is used. This is called "Usage Experience". There will be more about the different experience types in the sub category "Experience Types".

As you continually succeed in surveying or using your pistol, you will notice that the experience points are accumulated in your Skills Interface (CTRL-S). When you get enough experience of a certain type, you will get a system message telling you that you have become eligible to train in a higher level skill box than you currently have. This is what earning experience is all about.

Experience may also be accumulated by performing certain Quests (as a reward) or by trading in faction points to faction recruiters. Trading faction to recruiters converts faction points to any experience type the player currently has skills to learn. For example an artisan trading in faction points for experience can obtain general crafting experience. All faction trades in at a ratio of 1 faction point per every 1 experience point for all types of experience.

Losing Exp

Experience can be stockpiled by the player up to a certain cap limit. This cap is set for each skill box individually, within the skills.iff file. Upon reaching the cap, the player will not obtain anymore experience and will receive a short one time notification each time they reach a cap for a particular type of skill. If a player surrenders the skill box while still having experience stockpiled,they will keep the stockpiled experience until they do some action using a weapon or ability that relates to that type of experience. For example, if a player using pistols 4 in marksman, and has capped pistol experience at 200,000 drops their current skill to pistols 1 (which has a cap of 10,000) and then kills a mob they will then lose 190,000 experience and max out at the cap for pistol 1. A player does not need to have capped experience in order to lose it however. Any amount over the current skill level's cap will be lost if any experience for that type is gained or if a mob is killed using a weapon/ability for particular category. The principal is the same for non combatant professions as well. If an dancer for example performs a dancing flourish, they will lose dancing experience; If a bio-engineer performs a sample, they will lose dna-sampling experience; A crafter making an item.

Experience Types

As mentioned before there are different types of experience for different types of skills. Examples of some of the different types of experience are as follows:

To earn combat experience in a certain weapon, you need to use that weapon in combat and successfully defeat creatures. When you do this, you will earn weapon experience as well as general combat experience.

Crafting experience is earned when you successfully craft an item, and then have someone use that item for X amount of time. At lower levels, you get more experience granted to you at the time of item creation than from its long time use. As you get into the higher levels of crafting, your experience allotment leans more towards the long time usage and less for the actual creation of the item.

To earn healing experience, you need to successfully heal pool damage (Mind, Action, and Health), or successfully heal wounds on other players. Unfortunately, healing yourself will not grant you experience.

Entertainer experience is earned by either dancing or playing an instrument while someone, who needs healing, chooses to "Watch" you dance or "Listen" to you play. "Watch" and "Listen", among other choices, are able to be selected through your radial menu (please see the appropriate section for more information on "radial menus"). This must be done inside a Cantina, Hotel, or Theater. As you slowly heal them, you earn small ticks of entertainer experience over time.

Experience Calculations

Crafting Experience

Crafting experience is obtained by crafting items. Each item has a set amount of experience associated with it within the draf_schematic iff files. When an item is crafted in Practice Mode however, it receives a 5% bonus over the listed experience.

Racial Experience Bonuses

Most races have an innate bonus to experience earned when performing certain activities. A list of these can be found in the file species.iff.

Human: 5% bonus to all activities i.e crafting, scout, trapping, combat, weapon, jedi, squad leader, creature handling, image designing, dancing, musician, entertainer healing

Rodian: 5% bonus to investigation and scout experience

Mon Calimari: 3% bonus to structure and armor crafting. 7% bonus to squad leader experience.

Bothan: 10% bonus to scout experience.

Twilek: 7% bonus to dancing experience. 3% bonus to musician experience.

Usage Experience

(Note Usage XP was removed in late 2003 or by early 2004. This is only here to serve as documentation for how it worked)

Hand-crafted items give UXP (usage experience, the experience granted when someone else uses your item), items crafted in factories give no UXP. You currently must be logged in and on the same planet as the person using your crafted equipment to get UXP. Consumable items (such as foods), Weapon Upgrade Kits, commando weapons etc give 50% of their original creation UXP the instant they are used up, provided they were hand-crafted and not made in a factory. Buildings provide up to 100% of the original creation experience and other items such as cloths, armor, weapons etc give 150% of the original value. Clothing, armor and weapons are consisdered active use items in that the user has to have these items equiped and on their person (in the case of clothes) for usage experience to be calculated. For clothing the count is 1 exp per 60 seconds that the item is worn. For armors, the experience is acrued based on how long the armor is hit. For weapons, this value seems to be determined based on how long/often the weapon is being fired.

Weapon and Combat Experience

The exact nature of combat oriented experience calculations in SWG are unknown at the moment however it appeared to be based upon some calculation taking into account set mob experience values for a given creature/npc along with its challenge level vs the player's challenge level with their currently equipped weapon or skill set. For more information on challenge levels see the section on Combat Difficulty Rating.

Another factor in this is the percentage sharing of experience based on the amount of damage done. An individual shares in the experience of the creature or npc based upon how much damage they have done to its total ham before the creature died, much like in determining looting rights. The percentage of damage done to the creature is reflected in the percentage of the experienced received. This allows for grouped and ungrouped players to share experience from the same targets.

Combat experience is derived based upon the total weapon type experience earned within the fight multiplied by 1/10th. There fore Combat experience is always one-tenth of experience earned. Not all weapons have special weapon types or classifications. Grenades for example do not have a weapon type (such as being a pistol or unarmed for vibro knucklers/bare fist) Weapons that do not have weapon types are considered to generate their entire experience amounts as pure combat experience.

One formula for calculating weapon experience could be as follows:

( ( ( MOB CL / Player CL ) x 10) x Base Exp Of Mob ) x Group Exp bonus Multiplier x Racial Multiplier)

Where:

Mob cl = Opponent's Challenge level

Player Cl = Player Challenge level

Base exp = Base experience of the creature or npc

Group exp bonus multiplier = Multiplier for being in a group. Group bonus appears to be 20% flat bonus for grouping (either a pet or another player). Additional bonus is applied after the group size becomes 10 or more. Each person beyond 9 members in the group adds an additional 1% bonus to the total up to a maximum of 30% bonus for a group of 20.

Racial Multiplier: Multiplier applied for a particular race.

Example:

So if you were level 5, and you fought a level 3 MOB worth 100 experience, you could get 60 experience. Since in SWG you can switch weapon types in mid battle, the amount of weapon experience you got was equal to:

( ("Damage dealt with that weapon" / Maximum health of the MOB ) x Total Possible EXP)

Referring back to that last example, if you used a polearm weapon for 50 pts of damage, and a sword for 90 points of damage, you'd get 21 polearm exp and 39 sword experience.

You also gained Combat experience (basically, the most general experience that almost every class used at some point in time) which was equal to 1/10 of the total gained exp. Thus in the past example, you'd get 6 combat experience.

Example:

Player fighting npc using unarmed combat and pistol weapon.

file:///C:/anhwork/downloads/All-Logs/wyz/profiles/ParaHawk14/Ahazi/30570852390.uis_Combat1_.html

00:25:25 You swing at House Oco (a Ragtag kook) but miss.
00:25:25 House Oco (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and hits for 33 points of damage.
00:25:25 Your Ubese Armor Gloves armor prevented 21 points of damage.
00:25:27 Sseuneowiz (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and hits for 36 points of damage.
00:25:27 Your Ubese Armor Pants armor prevented 24 points of damage.
00:25:28 You swing at House Oco (a Ragtag kook) and hit for 87 points of damage.
00:25:28 House Oco (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and hits for 43 points of damage.
00:25:29 Your Ubese Armor Jacket armor prevented 29 points of damage.
00:25:31 House Oco (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and misses.
00:25:32 Sseuneowiz (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and hits for 25 points of damage.
00:25:32 Your Ubese Armor Jacket armor prevented 16 points of damage.
00:25:32 You swing at House Oco (a Ragtag kook), but she dodges out of the way.
00:25:35 That target is out of range.
00:25:35 Sseuneowiz (a Ragtag kook) swings at you and hits for 43 points of damage.
00:25:35 Your Ubese Armor Pants armor prevented 29 points of damage.
00:25:37 You shoot at House Oco (a Ragtag kook) but miss.
00:25:38 You cannot lose any more of Thug faction standing.
00:25:38 You cannot gain any more of Townsperson faction standing.
00:25:39 You shoot at House Oco (a Ragtag kook) and hit for 180 points of damage.
00:25:39 You receive 45 points of Unarmed Combat experience.
00:25:39 You receive 3 points of Pistol Weapons experience.
00:25:39 You receive 4 points of Combat experience.

Source References