Experience (obsolete)
Obsolete mechanics
Overall state of mind
The overall state of mind system was temporarily disabled in July 2009, meaning that your mind state will always be "clear." Mind murk will return in some form at an unspecified time.
Overall mind states decreased the rate at which you absorbed experience into new ranks. Whenever you are "mind locked" in a skill, you cannot not add new experience in the field pool of that skill until it pulses back down below mind lock. Under the overall mind state system, if you continued to gain experience while you were mind locked, the experience spilled over into the "mind state" pool. When you were mind locked in skills for an extended period of time, your mind state worsened.
The consequence of having a degraded mindstate was that you would absorb a diminished amount of field experience with each skill pulse, with the penalized percentage being lost entirely.
The overall mind states were as follows:
- clear
- fluid
- murky
- very murky
- thick: penalty begins
- very thick
- dense
- very dense
- stagnant
- very stagnant
- frozen: no longer absorbing experience
- very frozen
The learning penalty increased as your mind state worsened until you stopped absorbing any experience at "frozen." (Being "very frozen" simply meant that it took even longer for your mind state to improve.) The only way to improve a poor mind state was to stop gaining field experience for a while. This gave your overall mind state pool a chance to drain.
If you improved your pool size or pulse rate, it took longer to mind lock, and therefore, you could train for longer periods of time without filling your mind state pool. However, the best way to avoid a poor mind state was to avoid being mind locked in multiple skills for an extended period of time.
When the new experience system was released, mind states were disabled. At the time GMs stated that the mind state system would return, but not in the way it was previously implemented.
Wall cycle
Under earlier versions of the DR game engine, the rate of experience absorption varied by rank depending on skillset placement, following an eight- (primary), four- (secondary), or two-rank (tertiary) cycle. The last rank of the cycle was known as a "wall rank" since it was the slowest and hardest to gain. The first rank of each cycle was the fastest, with longer cycles starting at a faster rate than shorter cycles and the final rank of each cycle was roughly equivalent in relative pulse size across all skillsets.
| Approx. pulse size ratio | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary | 9/9 | 8/9 | 7/9 | 6/9 | 5/9 | 4/9 | 3/9 | 2/9 |
| Secondary | - | - | - | - | 5/9 | 4/9 | 3/9 | 2/9 |
| Tertiary | - | - | - | - | - | - | 3/9 | 2/9 |
The wall cycle paradigm for experience gain was removed in the mid 2000's (precise date?). Technically, there is still a wall cycle of two ranks for every skill because the system wouldn't accommodate removing it entirely, however, the difference between a wall rank and a non-wall rank was made to be negligible. Now, primary skills always pulse better than secondary skills which always pulse better than tertiary skills.
Experience pool states
The experience pool states under the old system were:
- clear
- learning
- thoughtful
- pondering
- concentrating
- muddled
- very muddled
- perplexing
- perplexed
- bewildering
- bewildered
- dazed
- mind lock