TruthScape.com - The Training Option Spectrum and Skill Activity Ratings

The trade-off between training speed and money doesn’t mean that skills have only a “high cost, fast XP” method and a “low cost slow XP” alternative—they have many, sometimes even dozens of options for training. In deciding how to level any skill, your goal should be to learn what the options are, decide how they fit into the trade-off between time and money, and choose the ones that best balances your needs in terms of leveling speed and finances.

The training options for most skills tend to fall into a spectrum. At one end there are options that provide a great deal of XP but at a very high cost; at the other end, options that are much cheaper, or even make money, but are considerably slower. And in between there are a variety of compromises, with XP rewards generally increasing as financial rewards decrease (or costs increase, as the case may be). This is not always a perfect equation, but it’s usually pretty close.

As an example, let’s consider a few general training strategies for the Farming skill, which I’ve listed in order from best to worst in terms of XP:

These are not all the ways to work the Farming skill, of course, but it gives you a general idea of the trade-offs involved.

Next, consider some options for training the Fishing skill. This is a resource skill, which means you always make money, yet the trade-offs are still present, just in a different form:

Of course, you don’t have to choose only one of the options on these lists! I am not a big fisherman myself, but I sometimes do all of these different activities, depending on my mood.

We can assess the quality of any training option by considering what it costs us in terms of both money and time, bearing in mind that some will have a positive monetary yield (making money) while some will be negative (losing money). For this purpose, I define three ratings for skill activities.

The first I call skill activity value (SAV); it represents the amount of money gained or lost by the activity for the amount of experience it provides. This is done by subtracting the value of the activity’s inputs from its outputs, and dividing the result by the amount of XP it gives, to produce a number measured in units of gold pieces per experience point (gp/XP):

This value can be positive (indicating a money-making skill), zero (money-neutral) or negative (money-losing). Obviously, bigger numbers mean a more attractive activity.

The second measure is skill activity speed (SAS), which gauges how quickly you can get XP when conducting this activity. It is calculated simply, by multiplying the number of XP per item made by the number of items that can be made per hour:

This number is measured in XP/hr, is always positive, and again, higher numbers are better.

We can multiply these two figures and then divide by 1000 to get what I call the skill activity profitability (SAP), which is measured in thousands of gold pieces per hour:

High positive figures are good money-makers; low positive figures are poor money-makers; and negative figures are money-losers.

How about a couple of examples. First, let’s go Fishing: suppose I fish sharks, and I am able to catch 95 in an hour. Each shark gives 110 Fishing XP and they sell for 900 gp a piece. There are no costs involved in fishing, essentially, so I can calculate values for this activity as follows:

So I earn about 8 gp per XP in fishing sharks, with a speed of 10.4k XP/min, and the overall profitability is 85.6k per hour.

Most people don’t care about the ratings of activities in isolation: they want to know whether one activity is more worth doing than another. To do this, we must consider both how much money Activity #2 makes relative to Activity #1, and how much XP Activity #2 gives relative to Activity #1.

After a fair bit of research and experimentation, I’ve devised a system that uses the SAS and SAP figures defined above to calculate what I call the time value equivalent (TVE) of substituting one activity for another. The TVE answers this question: “If Activity #2 gives more XP per hour than Activity #1, and I choose the faster activity, how much do I need to earn in the time that it saves me in order for the value of both skills to be equal?” Or, put another way, “How much am I really paying per hour for the faster leveling option?”

Let’s define SAS1, SAS2, SAP1 and SAP2 as the SAS and SAP figures for Activity #1 and Activity #2 respectively. Then:

This looks complicated, but don’t worry about that—I do the calculations, and it’s quite easy to use and understand. The TVE simply represents the hourly value that you must earn in the time you save on a faster activity for it to be worthwhile. If the TVE is negative, that always means the faster activity is worth doing. If it is positive, then ask yourself if that’s an amount of money you’d be able to earn easily; if it is, then the faster activity is worthwhile, and otherwise it is not.

Let’s take another example, this time a transformation skill: Smithing. I’m going to take some mithril bars and make them into unfinished mithril bolts. Suppose I am able to smith 170 bars in 18 minutes; the bars cost 1,100, and each makes 10 bolts selling for 95 gp each (so 950 worth of output per bar). Here are the calculations:

Smithing these arrowheads costs 3 gp per XP earned; I can earn 28.3k XP per minute, and the overall cost for this training activity is about 85k per hour.

Now, a different type of smithing activity: smelting gold ore into gold bars using goldsmithing gauntlets, a common method of powerleveling. Suppose I can do one load of 28 in 90 seconds, each gold ore costs 450 gp and each bar sells for 180 gp, so I lose 270 gp per ore. The calculations are:

As expected, smelting gold results in far faster XP than making mith bolts, but at a much greater cost. Is it worth doing? Let’s calculate the TVE:

But how does gold smelting fare in terms of productivity for the cost compared to the bolts?

This value means that if you spend extra money to get more XP by Smelting gold, compared to making mith bolts, you have to make 92.7k per hour in the time you save this way to make it worthwhile. For most people, that’s a good deal, and probably worth doing.

We can use the ratings we just discussed to illustrate how well various options for training a skill perform in terms of both money made (or lost) and time required. Charting these in two dimensions makes it easy to understand the trade-offs, and to identify which types of activities are most appealing to you personally.

You can do this with exact numbers, by actually calculating out the SAV and SAS ratings for a number of training options, but this may be impractical due to constantly changing item prices. Sometimes it be helpful to just chart options more broadly, showing approximately where they fall in these two areas. Figure 135 shows an example I did for the Farming skill options I mentioned earlier.; it is not meant to be cover every possible option, just to show some of the available methods and how they compare in these two measures.

**Figure 135: Skill Activity Ratings Map for Farming**
Here is an example map of the SAV and SAS values for common Farming activities. (It’s only *approximate* so please don’t yell at me if you disagree with it. J) Notice the general tendency of good options to fall along a line from the top left (fast XP at high cost) to the bottom right (slower XP but better in terms of money.)

The Essential Skill Training Trade-off - Speed Versus Money

Powerleveling versus Smartleveling

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Last Update: May 28, 2008

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