Topic

Learning super fast? Some confusion.

There's something that confuses me a little - when I speed up my skill learning at a shrine, there's a message under the skill timer:

Whoa! You're learning super fast. Keep in mind, if you switch skills you'll lose your super speed.


However, it looks like rather than speeding up learning, it just cut off x time off the timer. In which case the 'speediness' isn't very relevant? I did switch skills and noticed that the timer stayed the same (it was still shortened).

So maybe I'm misinterpreting the above or this is an artifact from a previous version of skill learning?

Posted 8 months ago by Spirit of Xanadhi Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • Speeding up skills does indeed mean cutting time off the remaining total, but I've always understood that if we switched skills the  timer would reset (reinstating whatever we'd cut off with donations) on the paused one.  I actually never tried it; perhaps you're the beneficiary of a lucky bug, or perhaps it was always just a scare tactic. ;)
    Posted 8 months ago by oscarette Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Learning super fast only happens for a certain amount of time, if you haven't hit the max yet. If it gets to the point where you start learning at normal speed again, then you are wasting time that you won't be able to speed up later... Say you speed up a skill the instant you can after beginning to learn it. If you keep on speeding it up to max before the learning super fast buff wears off, then you can speed it up the maximum amount possible (half the total initial learning time). However, if the buff wears off and you start learning at normal speed, you will not be able to get all the way down to half the total--the longer you let it go at normal speed, the farther from this maximum skill speed-up you get. Learning super fast is an indicator that you're in the zone, and you should try to stay that way.
    Posted 8 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh wow, I had no idea about that... it's a little more involved than I imagined. I'll have to try this out and see... thanks for your responses!
    Posted 8 months ago by Spirit of Xanadhi Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If you switch skills, the new skill is not on super speed. The old skill still has the reduced total time, and it will still be on super speed when you switch back. (You only "lose" your speed in the sense that you will need to donate more or use emblems/items to start learning the new skill fast. It's only a problem if you want to learn everything as fast as possible.)

    However, if you've learned enough total skills that your brain is full, starting skills makes everything slower. The old skill and the new skill will both have the time penalty associated with the number of skills you've started, NOT the number you've finished, so it's more efficient to finish one skill before going on to the next. At least that's what it looked like to me.
    Posted 8 months ago by Franzeska Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Here's how it works:

    Learning Skills Faster by Spending Favor
    You start learning a skill, say you need 10 hours to learn it.  You are learning at normal speed.

    If you spend favor points you learn at double speed for a while.  Say you spend enough to learn at double speed for one hour.  That means that in the next hour you'll get two hours of progress done, which will leave 8 hours remaining.  So the total time to learn is now 1 hour + 8 hours = 9 hours.  Because this is the way the math works, learning at double speed for a certain amount of time always means taking exactly that amount of time less to learn.

    The difference between learning at double speed and cutting time off, however, is that learning at double speed has an obvious maximum.  If you need ten hours to learn something you can only possibly learn at double speed for 5 hours, because then you'll be done.  Thus, you can only cut learning time in half.

    So, if a skill says 10 hours to learn the fastest you can learn it is 5 hours, but you may not be able to achieve that if you don't spend favor points right away.  If, for example, you wait two hours before donating and spending points then there are only eight hours left, which means you can only learn at double speed for four hours, making the total time to learn six hours (2 before you spent points plus 4 after).

    If you start by spending points to get one hour of double speed and then you spend more points within that hour to get another four hours of double speed, then you still get done in five hours because you never take a break from double speed learning.  If you learn at double for one hour, take a one hour break from double, then donate again then you could learn in 5.5 hours (1 hour of double speed + 1 hour of normal speed + at least 3.5 hours of double speed to cover the seven hours remaining).

    Switching Skills
    So what happens when you switch skills?  Unfortunately weird things happen.  From the text I think what is supposed to happen is that you simply lose your double speed, but that's not what happens.

    Say you start your 10 hour skill, knock two hours off by spending favor points, then switch to a different 4 hour skill immediately (so your 10 hour skill still says 8 hours left).  You return to normal speed, so it will take four hours unless you donate again.  After, you go back to your 10 hour skill.  I have observed two different things that will happen:

    1. Most commonly what happens is you go back with 8 left and you cannot spend any more favor points to reduce the time to learn.  It gives you an "already learning at maximum speed" message even though you really should be able to knock another 3 hours off.

    2. Occasionally instead you go back and you are not learning fast and you can actually spend favor points to reduce the 8 hours to 4 hours - so you learn the skill faster than you should be able to.  This has happened to me on three occasions but I have never figured out why (I've tried lots of things to try to reproduce it to make a good bug report).

    I believe both cases are bugs, the first one being well known and the second being strange.  The second case may happen more often than I think - I only noticed it for the first time when it happened to me with Teleport 5 since after maxing out my donations I realized that I learned the skill days faster than I should have.

    Pungent Sunrise and Time Quoins
    Drinking a Pungent Sunrise or collecting a Time Quoin will knock that amount of time off your current learning time *even if you are learning at double speed*.  Thus, if you have already halved the time to learn, these can still make you learn faster.
    Posted 8 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Incredibly well thought out explanation! Thank you Fran and Humbabella, I totally get the idea now. My maths has gotten rusty haha. I think I experienced Bug #1 as well... but at least that clears things up now.
    Posted 8 months ago by Spirit of Xanadhi Subscriber! | Permalink
  • (sorry to double post but I also just noticed that you've got an awesome math blog, which is very cool and useful... and you are in the D3 beta!! I just started a group on Glitch called Sanctuary, no members yet, but am eagerly awaiting my pre-ordered CE for May 15)

    /derail
    Posted 8 months ago by Spirit of Xanadhi Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella, does a yellow tincture fit in the Pungent Sunrise/Time Quoin category?  I assume it does, and I've been slamming them like, uh, like triangular cups of bureaucrat water, just to take the edge off the forever it's gonna take to learn Furnituremaking II.
    Posted 8 months ago by Pale Queen Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I believe that pungent sunrises no longer give you time off if you are already at maximum speed up from donations. They will do so if you are learning at double speed but not at maximum yet, but once you hit maximum they are worthless. Also, I heard that donating them to a shrine shortens your time more than drinking them. This could have changed since I last asked a dev about it, but ever since that conversation I decided they were worthless and stopped wasting my time on them.
    Posted 8 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Pungent sunrises still work at max learning speed, yellow flower and essence do not.  It could be that pungent sunrises are not supposed to work and that this is a bug, I hadn't really considered that.
    Posted 8 months ago by Humbabella Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Staff did say it was a bug in Live Help
    Posted 8 months ago by IrenicRhonda Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Humbabella, you've pretty much got it.  I'll preface this by saying that I still have no idea why the rock talks about losing the speed.  What you really lose is the eligibility to get (more) speed.

    With your two scenarios at the end, #1 is exactly how it should work -- you're no longer eligible to move into double time, so you are actually learning as fast as you can (key word there is "you"). =)  With #2, that's indeed a rare bug that has been around for at least 6 months.  The only consistent point I know of with it involves waiting an indeterminate amount of time (somewhere in the vicinity of "long") before returning to the skill.  The only non-buggy way you can spend on the skill again is if you wait until you've gone through the accelerated time and are no longer "super fast" before you pause it.  My old (but still accurate!) breakdown of skill pausing mechanics is here:  http://www.glitch.com/forum/general/4951/#reply-43662 The only major change now is that you can also watch for the warning on your skills page -- if the rock does not tell you that you'll lose your speed, it's safe to switch.
    Posted 8 months ago by Magic Monkey Subscriber! | Permalink
  • *kaboom/poof* <---my head exploding...
    Posted 8 months ago by b3achy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • This is obviously too complicated and not well enough explained. Hopefully the new system fixes this. We need to prevent future heads from exploding (sorry, too late for you b3achy).
    Posted 8 months ago by Shepherdmoon Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If you want the simple version, it's this: 

    If the rock gives you a warning, you can't speed up that skill again after you pause it.

    If the rock has no warning, you can pause to your heart's content and be full of half-learned things that will still go faster later.

    Hopefully that's less head-explody!
    Posted 8 months ago by Magic Monkey Subscriber! | Permalink