Skillup Marathon Event (Sep 24 - Oct 1)

[+Colibri]

We're having a full-week, 168 hour contest to see who can skill up a character the most.

Signup stone will open up in Moonglow Bank at 19:00 shard time, late entries are also possible.
At 19:00 shard time (or as you signup, if you enter later) all participant's characters will have their skills and stats reset. Skills to 0, stats to all 100.
Exactly one week later, on October 1st at 19:00 shard time, the competition ends and participants' skills and stats will be restored back to how they were before the start. You can use an alt character, or even use your main character.

Prizes:
1st place: 500 ED
2nd place: 300 ED
3rd place: 200ED
4th-10th place: 100ED
Plus participation rewards for everyone
(there will be a minimum total skill achieved during the contest to get a participation prize, just signing up on the stone and not doing anything won't count).
Side reward: Powerscroll 120 Of Your Choice to the player who has the biggest sum of overcap skills.
(Using a single 120 powerscroll counts the same as first using a +10, then a +15, and finally a +20. It's about how far overcap your skills are, not about the number of powerscrolls consumed.)



During this contest, anything goes. You can use skill balls, skill elixiers, skill essences... You can also use powerscrolls to raise any number of your skills beyond 100. Next time there will be restrictions and just regular training by fighting and crafting will be possible.


19:43 shard time:
The marathon has begun and there are currently 5 participants. Scoreboard coming soon. It's now also possible to resign during the marathon, in case you signed up with the wrong character or just by mistake... but keep in mind that all progress is lost.
It's worth considering whether you want to start with your main character or an alt character. Btw using any kind of gear/equipment is permitted, and there's no problem with passing your gear between your characters.
Scoreboard coming soon. Scores of all participants are also collected/recorded every hour might be accessible at some point in the future.

20:45 shard time:
Scoreboard is now available on the Marathon stone.

00:30 shard time:
Side reward added - Powerscroll 120 Of Your Choice.
Five and a half hours in, there are 23 participants, here's the top 5:
Balbanes, Mervin Armstrong, Shogun Magne (as Duncan MacLeod), Montolio, Seventh Stone

Sept 26th at 23:20 shard time:
Participation reward treshold is set at 700 skill points, quite easy to obtain but still takes a bit longer than just 5 minutes. There are now 33 participants.
We're a a bit over 48 hours into the contest, top 5 contestants are:
Steamed Hams 4525 points, Balbanes 4355 points, Seventh Stone 3698 points, Lorak 3646 points, Mervin Armstrong 3581 points. 10th player on the list is Bella Stormborn with 3117 points. The median contestant has 2650 points.
Btw one person has bought a +50 skill ball since Sunday, but they are not competing.

October 1st at 19:00 shard time:
The marathon has completed.

October 1st at 20:00 shard time:
Rewards were given out. The participation reward bears the name of your primary character, you will find the reward (including ED if you qualify) in the bank box of the character you competed with.

Final post with results:
viewtopic.php?p=83180#p83180

[MagicUser]

As a potential suggestion, if this is done again in the future. Could up the risk or do multiple marathons at the same time.

• only fel(maybe make it longer so people have a chance to get somewhere with it).
• forced new character one (couldn't rely on previous skill scrolls).
• No account access (put all participants in an instance of a facet so no one can get stuff from their account).

Could be mutually exclusive or try for all of them at the same time.

As a potentially random thought. I seem to remember some stuff with the Harry Potter event where all of your stuff was removed and put in your bank? So maybe the no account access could be a portal type trick. You enter the new world with the event presets and you exit that world with whatever you had on before entering. Not sure how far you are into instancing, so maybe all of that is way too extravagant. Certainly unnecessary. Might be an expandable piece though. If you did it for a future event the technique would be usable for other events. The ability to set up event worlds seems like a useful tool in the tool belt.

Thanks for the unexpected event +C .

[Silent]

I will update this comment with things that could be modified in this event as I keep running it:

-Powerscroll reset. This would make players use alt. characters and would create more market for powerscrolls.

-We've discussed the problem of creating more resource generation through skill grinding, what if the event stone could have a dump feature that would give players a secondary bonus. If players want to buy and dump extra resources it would only benefit the overall economy. Also, this doesn't have to be ED related but give out something like "dumpster podium prize" could even be a small ore cart hahaha.

-There seems to be a substantial bonus for players using relayers. Either for buffing carrying capacity/healing/maxhp and faster cast + faster cast recovery. Perhaps there should be a way to balance this for new players to have a more balanced fighting chance.

[culichi]

might be the first player to cap every skill but only colibri knows for sure.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9919

[Eremite]

This would require a bit of scripting and world-building, but it might be worth making an area that you're limited to during the event with special rules, etc.

Things that make it an uneven competition and foils against them:

1. Personal Trainers - You can AFK combat skills to max while others are limited to the public training room limit of ~75 or so? No housing/PTs in the contest area get rid of this.

2. Existing balance of Power Scrolls/Elixirs/Essences/etc. Easy skills to macro give a significant advantage if you can boost that +20 and another +10 from essences. It's less of a strategy to skilling up than just dumping your existing resources into it. No access to Vendors/ExEx in the area fixes this.
* It might be worth adding a way to get Event Power Scrolls that are only usable by participants during the event and are reverted after. Adds some extra strategy - do you go for a PS for an easy-to-macro skill or focus on the more difficult ones?

3. Resource sharing: A friend joins with you and feeds you resources (iron/logs/cloth/etc) so you can raise crafting skills quickly. Also works for reagents/potions/arrows for other skills. Disable trade and make items keep their "reserved" status when dropped until they decay while in the area.

4. Existing player gear - Someone with a bunch of Re-Layers and amazing weapons are going to just go in and demolish stuff quickly and get more skills, etc. Someone without a 100% LRC set is also at a disadvantage, etc. Dump people in naked or give them special event gear (like a MistVale set) to start them out. All this gear is removed after the event.

5. Bank Boxes - Established players can load up their bank box with lots of fancy stuff. Remove all bankers from the area and either give an alternative stash box they can use (like a stronger box, but locked down in a central area), or just give everyone max items/weight on backpack for the duration of the event and they can have what they can carry.

6. Skill-Up Ball - This is fine. Keep it as it is. It's nice for harder skills or as a hail-mary near the end of the competition. Could lead to some interesting upsets as well - do you pop it early or wait till the last minute to try to lull people into a sense of security (assuming you can see leaderboards).

7. ED Rewards - Not having access to buying ED rewards would be nice - I don't expect that many people would dump a bunch of ED into a skill-up competition, but if they're like 50-60 skill points away from a 500 ED prize, why not drop 200 ED on a +50 skill ball (or 300 on a +120) if you come out ahead?

This might need a special tagging system added where you can mark people as participants and flags on gear that make it only usable, interactable by people in the event. That way when the event's over the items are unusable and can be easily cleaned up with some server-side scripting.

This is a lot of work, but it would go a long way to making it an actual level playing field where a new player and a decade+ vet are on even footing, aside from strategy and knowledge of the game, skillup methods, scripting, etc. There may be some other tricks I'm forgetting at the moment, as well.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[+Colibri]

Ok we're a bit over 48 hours in, there are 33 participants on the stone. It's nice to see that most of you who are participating, are taking it quite seriously. I was expecting more players to sign up and then not do much about it.

The minimum skill required to qualify for a participation reward is the proverbial 700 skill points.



@Paroxysmus yeah those were called Stripgates, and we also had Equalizing Robes that everyone would wear to set all stats to 100. I have a glimpse of an idea for sort of parallel worlds, which would have different rules - sort of minigames - and entering would reset your skills/stats and you'd also get a complete change of backpack and bank box. The tricky part is to make it so that any way one could enter or leave, has to switch your "character context". And with that we could have fun with a "fresh world" type of setting. Like, maybe even a week long PvP event where you fight over control of land, but you have to start with all the resources and such. Glad to hear you like the event

@Silent
Powerscroll reset - when you enter the event, all skill caps are reset to 100. Since all skills and also caps will be restored at the end (powerscrolls applied during the contest are lost/burned), this will be a nice sink for the abundance of powerscrolls out there. Well, in a way we'll restore them in a few days of champing but hey it's something Did you mean a kind of reset of powerscrolls in the "real" world as well, the permanent regular skills?
I like the idea of dumping and burning resources... this could actually be a separate week long event, and with some other prizes, maybe deco. Reminds me a bit of Destash raffle.
As for leveling the playing field, I'll write below...

@Eremite thank you for making a list of all the stuff that could be changed to make it an equal opportunity for vets vs newbies.

At first I was thinking - the next event would have to be restricted with skillballs, essences and elixiers. Then I thought about trainers, bags of holding, etc etc... And Eremite made a full list. So I think the only way to really make it equal, is to have a separate facet just for the contest. Just a plain Trammel world with vendors, maybe everybody gets some starter gear (even a house) or things to make it less boring in the first few days. It would be a bit of work to get it all set up, but if there is enough interest, I don't mind making it.


Oh just a separate idea, related to this... In clicker games, once you reach a certain level, you then reset your progress, to unlock a higher end-level (increase the cap). So maybe if we ever make it possible to have 125 in some skills, a side effect of using the skillball would be that it resets your skill to 0 - to train it again.

[culichi]

I like the idea of dumping and burning resources... this could actually be a separate week long event, and with some other prizes, maybe deco. Reminds me a bit of Destash raffle.

is there still hope of a final destash

[Silent]

@Silent
Did you mean a kind of reset of powerscrolls in the "real" world as well, the permanent regular skills?
I like the idea of dumping and burning resources... this could actually be a separate week long event, and with some other prizes, maybe deco. Reminds me a bit of Destash raffle.

Yes, during the event the player character's cap could be reset too. this would implicate that players who really wanted that advantage on the scoreboard would either have to max even the most boring skill or consume powerscrolls which would help clear the existent abundance.

For the ore dumping: if you find a raffle to be more feasible, what I would suggest was that you would consider any ore amount (for example of 1k = 1 ticket) this would allow resources on EXEX to be depleted based on offer and demand. Lets say iron is dumped to a point that dull cooper is now cheaper, than players could buy the other ore just to dump more entries. Similar to a standard raffle where people dump money in it. they would be dumping money on a circular economy. This could be a 2 weeks long raffle and then switch to lumber and then reagents. (happening every few months) New players could find grinding a profitable way of scaling up in life.

As for the leveling, I was brainstorming to myself this morning about it, you could create an area just for the event where characters would enter full naked. But that would not allow trading to happen (powerscrolls, elixers etc...). So I can't think of anything that would require simple codding for this.

On a side note: Congratulations for this event. It gave me something interesting and different to do. I believe that's what its all about

Thank you

[Orionesss]

Thanks for this event. It pulled me out of my comfortable banksitting for the past year or so

[+Colibri]

We're in the last 24 hours of the marathon! It ends Sunday at 19:00 shard time.
If you haven't joined yet - well, you probably don't have a chance to get a significant reward, but you can still get the participation reward. You still need to achieve 700 skill points to qualify, which is something that can be done in under an hour, or two hours tops. So you're welcome to try it out in the final hours - it's a fun thing to experience

[MagicUser]

I edited the sheet I made in the screen shots for the shard. The sheet now allows for player toggling in case you want to see more or less compared on the graph together.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[+Colibri]

The marathon has finished, it's great to see so many participants. Congratulations to the winner, Seventh Stone! Although it was a very close call so it looks like every minute of the marathon mattered. Coding skills seemed to give a significant advantage as well.

Top 5 contestants are:
Seventh Stone with 5863.3 points,
Steamed Hams (as SkillGainEventB) with 5849.6 points,
culichi (as pippi) with 5800.5 points,
Balbanes 5703.9 points,
and Mervin Armstrong with 5493.5 points.

Total of 43 participants, all qualified for the participation reward, gathered a sum of 136408 skill points. The median player had 3105 points.
Side reward was won by Balbanes with 815 points.

This was a fun change of pace with programming, since I could just do something from scratch that doesn't require first fixing bugs or considering numerous legacy code and how it would just add extra complexity to an already big and old shard codebase. Doing events is fun, but cleanup isn't (fun, or completely possible) so a lot of the time we just leave a lot of stuff, which then accumulates over time.
@MagicUser what an awesome graph, thanks for sharing with everyone!

The stone now supports flipping thru pages of contestants so you can find yourself on the list as well. Clicking the questionmark-button will show you that player's progression thru time.

Btw, I'm sorry about the confusion with the side-reward and the meaning of "overcap". This was just about applying powerscrolls, but there was no need to train up those skills to that value. As I read my description of it in this thread, I see I didn't explain it very well... well, live and learn, I'll explain it better next time.

I plan on doing another week-long marathon, based on killing monsters with different names and trying to collect as many names as possible. There are numerous monsters with random names out there, but those random names are based on finite lists... so it could be possible to collect them all. Maybe in November.

And I think we can run another skillup marathon, but with more restrictions, possibly just in a separate facet with abundant resources. Maybe 6 months from now or a year... And I guess we can re-run this kind of marathon without any restrictions again in the far future.


Thank you all for participating!