Why

The live server's ledger asked for this rather than a hunch. A character sitting at Rist level 12 held 1346 XP, of which WoodCutting alone was 666 - half the character was felled trees, and everything earned in a fight came to 293, under a quarter of the whole. The level had stopped describing the character and started describing how long they had stood in the Meadows with an axe.

The existing weighting compounded the wrong way. XP being the level reached is right on its own, but the safest repeatable activity in the game is also the one that climbs highest, so it was collecting the most level-ups and the most XP per level-up.

Raising LevelBaseXp or LevelExponent cannot fix that, and it is the obvious reach, so it is worth saying why not: both scale the whole curve, so the ratio survives untouched and the late game pays for a problem that lives in the first hour. That is exactly what happened when the pair was 60 and 1.5, and it had to be walked back.

Added

• SkillWeights - a multiplier per skill, as Skill=multiplier pairs. The default table is built on risk: full price for a skill raised by something that can kill you, half for one that is situational, a quarter for repetition that cannot hurt you. Synced from the host, so a server sets it for everyone on it.

  discuss

• DefaultSkillWeight - what a skill not named in the table is worth. 1, so a skill added by a game update or another mod is paid normally rather than silently going unpaid.

  discuss

• WeightGeneration - bump it to any different text and every character is re-priced once, on its next login, from the skill levels this server watched it reach.

  discuss

Changed

• Existing characters are re-priced on their next login. The bundled generation is 1 and no existing ledger line carries a stamp, so this happens once, automatically. The character above goes from level 12 to level 6, with 53% of it now earned fighting.

  discuss

• Runestones already taken are kept. A character re-priced from 12 to 6 holds all twelve and earns no new pick until it passes twelve again. Refunding them would turn a re-pricing into a free rebuild of the whole character.

  discuss

• The join-time credit is weighted by the same function as the re-pricing, deliberately shared so the two can never drift apart.

  discuss

Ledger format

The ledger is now v4, carrying the generation each record was last re-priced at. v1-v3 are still read and come back as never re-priced, which is what they are.

This is a one-way door. A v4 line does not parse on 1.0.1 or earlier, which drops the record rather than erroring, so copy rist-ledger.txt aside before updating a server you care about.