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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 is only 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.

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.

Experience Types

As mentioned before there are different types of experience for different types of skills.

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

The exact nature of 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. Challenge levels of players are calculated based upon the personal difficulty modifier within each skill box of a combat profession. Each player starts off with a challenge level of 5. For every 100 units of personal difficulty a player adds by training in a skill, one challenge level is gained. In order for the player to qualify for this challenge level, they must equip a weapon that is linked to the type of experience/profession to which they wish to attack the creature with. A pistoleer would there for require a pistol weapon to be equipped in order to receive the challenge modifiers linked to pistol skills. A teras kasi for example would require bare handed fighting or using a vibro knuckler. A player's challenge level cannot go above CL 25 so in essence a combined total of 2500 from modifiers is the maximum possible for an individual player.

Grouping has an interesting effect on this calculation. Groups have a difficulty modifier which takes into account the entirety of the challenge levels of the group and divides this value by 2. So a group of 25 elite combat profession masters would have a combined total of CL 25. A group of 10 cl 10 players and 10 cl 25 players would have an average of 17.5 or cl 17/18.

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.

One formula for calculating the experience could be as follows:

( (MOB CL / Player CL (or average of party) ) x Base Exp Of Mob ) x Group Exp bonus Multiplier)

Where:

Mob cl = Opponent's Challenge level

Player Cl = Player or group Cl

Base exp = Base experience of the creature or npc

Group exp bonus multiplier = Multiplier for being in a group or 1.25 if grouped 1.0 for ungrouped.

So if you were level 5, and you fought a level 3 MOB with 100 experiance, it you cuold get 60 experiance )

Since in SWG you can switch weapon types in mid battle, the ammount of weapon experiance you got was equal to

("Damge dealt with that weapon"/Maximum health of the MOB) X Total possible EXP.

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

You also gained Combat experiance (basically, the most general experiance 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 experiance.

Source References