Demise: Rise of the Ku'tan - Racial Penalties by Lok

IanthePez
Racial Penalties by Lok
RACIAL PENALTIES

While I was sitting here waiting upon my download, I decided to figure out once and for all how racial penalties affect experience. The first thing I noticed was the penalties listed in the help lesson do not linearily correlate to actual experience to level. So this is what I did. I created an artisan in each race, and wrote down its experience to level. I then ran them into the dungeon for one level's worth of experience, and wrote down the experience to pin + total experience. The total experience to reach level 3 was xp to pin + 1 + total experience. I then subtracted the total xp to reach level 2 from the total xp to reach level 3.

First I made an assumption that the xp fit the equation,

Y = (1+r)*X

Using an equation of this form expresses racial penalty as a percent increase in experience. This equation is similar to that for guild penalties, where a guild penalty of 0.1 translates into a 10% increase in required xp.

Where X the unpenalized race xp to level, R is the racial penalty, and Y is the xp you need for that paticular level. For X to go from level 1 to 2, I guessed 100xp, which is in accord with the crude penalties expressed in the racial table and a simple round number. From the level 2 xp, I determined r,

human = 0.33
yeti = 0.41
dwarf = 0.47
troll = 0.53
elf = gnome = giant = 0.58
saris = 0.63

Using these R, I calculated what the X was to go from level 2 to 3. This number was 266xp for about all of the races (got a 271 on one of them), so I concluded my xp method works.

What does this all mean? Well think about the derived penalties as an addition experience percent penalty. So a human is the fastest leveler requiring only 33% additional experience, and a saris is the most expensive requiring 63% additional experience. I guess they left themselves some room for future races which are even quicker learners than humans by starting humans with a 33% xp penalty. So the worst penalized race in the game is only 30% more total xp required than the cheapest. This is not as bad as the nominal 0.8 penalty for saris verses the nominal 0.3 penalty for human listed in the tables seems to imply. If you went with the nominal values, you might think that sarises would take 8/3 the xp to level of a human (not true) or a saris has an 80% relative to 30% xp penalty (also not true).

I really did check and found out that giants, gnomes, and elves all need identical level 1 artisan experience, so there is no roundoff error between these races, and they are truely identical from a racial penalty standpoint.

So the numbers in the racial penalty table are nominal figures which do not relate linearly to xp to level. If you wish to think of racial penalties as a fixed guild penalty (never goes up or down with level) which only applies to experience but not to gold, then for the races you have:

Saris = 0.3
Elf,giant,gnome= 0.25
Troll= 0.2
Dwarf=0.14
Yeti= 0.8
Human=0.0

Where I have scaled this relative to humans. For mushpots with high character levels, these kind of penalties will be negligable compared to the guild penalties, IE a 0.3 from race for saris is going to seem like nothing when a saris is at 101 in all guilds and carrying a 1.0 or more penalty on each.