MPR bug tracking (in General)

My latest theory is that this is linked to spell and skill training.

Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of characters around that train none of these. But just in case you have a farm or something lying around, let me know if you can confirm or refute this.

You can try on my char, Phoenix. Train, unlearn, fire.. whatever you like to do to it.

At the risk of being "dunced" again, I will still post simply because I want to try and help. Take a look at Djinni and Sefton. Both have spells learned, one was affected by the MPR correctifier, one was not. The major differences between the two are, Djinni wears a tattoo below his max tattoo and Sefton wears one above. Also, I cannot be certain that significant training has occurred on Djinni, but I know on Sefton it has. Since I was playing and training with Sefton after your correctifier, and noticed no change until after cache flush, I assume that any corrections that were to happen would have happened to both at that time.

Please take a look at the max tattoo system and see if it is perhaps a reason for the unstable MPR. I guess that perhaps the exp that the tattoo is supposed to gain, but cannot because it is above the max tattoo, is some how affecting the MPR system.

It's clearly not max-tattoo related; the vast majority of people affected do not have an oversize tattoo.

A while back I untrained protection on my day to day character.
Protection was at 6.

I lost close to 30k mpr.

The other day I was back up to 290k MPR.
Did NOT untrain anything and dropped 8k MPR.
TSCM noticed his MPR dropped at the same time.
We were both in chat when he mentioned his dropped so I looked and sure enough mine dropped too.

My Farm character..which I rarely use. and I mean Rarely....gets fought by other characters only.

He never lost any MPR. Today I untrained his protection and he dropped the amount that I expected from the loss of the XP when untraining.

Its possible the MPR loss is linked to the amout you fight?

And as I mentioned above...I did NOT untrain anything the second time the MPR dropped.

TMD

I find that my MPR becomes oversized when I store exp from battles and train large amounts at once. I then have to do the unlearn thing to bring it back down every time. While it is oversized my Max tattoo becomes quite large and my MPR and PR get heavily inflated and it seems to be more so the more exp I save up. Just this morning during exp time when I bought and burned all my BA, I raised 30K MPR with only training a little over 400K exp across all my minions. I unlearned and it dropped by about 20 to 25K MPR.

OK, and please I am just trying to help. I have skills and spells trained on both characters. The wall on Djinni is training bloodlust and ST and DX and HP, accept for UC and BL it is just like the UC tank on Sefton. Could it be related to minion and non-minion based tattoo? That is another difference. The one with a minion tattoo was unaffected, the one without a minion tattoo was.

Also, Sefton has never experienced any fluctuations previous to your correctifier. I cannot say for certain he has ever untrained in the past, so that may account for it.

Also Sefton changed tattoos from lesser to regular, and the regular tattoo was TA'd from RoS to ToBF, and it was done between cache flushes on the day the correctifier was applied.

Just tossing data out that might help you since I do have two examples, one affected, one not.

I can second Glory's post. Because I have a silly desire for round numbers, I tend to wait until blocks of 9K, 10K, or 11K experience build up before training. Also with the large rewards I gain untrained exp very quickly, so I tend to train large amounts of exp all at once vs. the more proper training of small amounts of exp due to the reapplication of VPR.

Just to throw out one more piece of info, I had my MPR drop about 100k this morning upon logging in (that is, it was 100k lower than it was when I left yesterday), and I have not untrained anything.

On the plus side, rewards improved. :)

It does not appear to be due to training large amounts of xp.

On TAB I have training only 1 xp on each character: Haste, VA, HP, and BL respectively. Most times my MPR does not change or goes up by 1, but I have had jumps of 1k, 2k, 4k and 10k and levels in between.

After learning 2 str on Death and unlearning my MPR goes back to normal.

Ive trained exp, then untrained so my MPR "corrects" itself. Ive then fought a few battles, trained around 500 exp on my minions, watched my PR rise, do a quick tiny untrain, and then watch it drop. Im pretty sure its not related to the amount of exp trained.

Maybe it is based on a particular skill that is being trained on a team. I am training AMF, GA, AS, and BL. I was experiencing the bug before adding Evasion and Protection to my team.

I hope this farm isn't too little to help Jon...

Talhearn has two minions, I trained all their xp into HP, Str and Dex at 1/4 each.

Stats at end of train;

PR/MPR: 82/82

1) XP: 1 HP: 40 STR: 40 DEX: 41
2) XP: 0 HP: 42 STR: 42 DEX: 42

I untrained Str on minion 1) for 44XP. This took me to;

PR/MPR: 72/72

I then trained the XP back into strength giving;

PR/MPR: 81/81 And 38 STR on minion 1).

All seems reasonable. :)

Fat fingers, the XP trained was 1/3 each...

I'm training AMF, BL, and VA. I "corrected" my MPR last week by training and then untraining CoC.

Since then, I've only trained BL and a few points of DX, and the MPR-correctifier reduced my MPR again.

So if it is a particular skill as Glory suggested, BL would seem to be the prime suspect.

although I have a skill, I'm not currently training it, however this whacky Ba I added only to FB, and saw the same old bug...twice as much PR as should have been added was, until I trained 2 str and untrained.

the PR on my char (S)Laughter Man dropped by 1/3 last night (30K). I unequipped and reequipped my morgul hammer and some of it recovered.

ok, let's try something new. I need a reproducible case.

If you'd like to help try to find one, create a disposable character and I'll give make it so his minions always have a few thousand XP to train. (I don't suggest creating the char with NCB, since he'll be deleted when this is over, but you wouldn't get another chance at NCB.)

What I need is "when I start from a char organized thus-and-so, and I train N xp into this set of stats, my MPR jumps to X. But when I train a couple points of ST then untrain it goes down."

So this will probably involve a lot of firing and re-hiring of minions since there is no other way to reproduce steps.

Like I said, CM me after you create the char if you're interested. I may not be able to accommodate all volunteers so don't sweat it if you don't hear back.

I like the addition of MPR to the train page BTW...thanks a heap!

I am just curious about one thing.

I was always under the impression that MPR was the easiest thing in the world to calculate. The equation is unknown, but something akin to looking at the levels of the various attributes, factoring in some constants and whatnot, and voila: an MPR number.

I can understand people's MPR getting thrown off. What I am not following is how people keep fluctuating. Surely, after every train the exact same calculation is called. If my stats are showing an increase, my MPR will go up. If they go down, MPR goes down. Something like:

function CalcMinionPR(array: skill/spell/intrinsic/DD levels)

That is really awful pseudo-code, but it just means that (my assumption) minion PR is a function that takes all the investments (skills, str, dex, hp, dd, and enchantment levels) and returns a value. A function cannot, by its very nature, take the same arguments twice and come up with different results (unless there is intentional randomization in the function -- I assume this is not the case for MPR). If I call the function thusly:

myVar = CalcMinionPR(HP=100K, FB=100K, AMF=100K)

I will get the same value _every_ time.

I don't understand how the results (myVar in the above case) can keep (sometimes wildly) fluctuating. Example: I just learned 5 STR, and my MPR remained unchanged. I would expect that. An extra 5 levels of something aren't going to show up in the six significant digits representing my MPR. I then unlearned the 5 STR and my MPR dropped from 268,953 to 266,112. So, that means (using figures that are fairly close to my actuals):

myVar1 = CalcMinionPR(HP=300K, FB=300K, AMF=100K, GA=30K, STR=5)

returned 268,953. Then:

myVar2 = CalcMinionPR(HP=300K, FB=300K, AMF=100K, GA=30K)

returned 266,112.

I don't see how that is possible (because the only difference is a level 5 attribuute) unless the MPR calculation is something VASTLY different than what I describe above (and if it is, I would ask...why?) I know it's not my game, and God knows I have over-designed my share of algorithms in this life. But can we be given any indication of how (roughly) MPR is calculated so that we can try to get our heads around plugging nearly the exact same numbers into a function is yielding very different results?

calculating MPR from total XP trained is easy.

calculating total XP trained from raw stats is very expensive.

so CB tries to track the former separately and keep it in sync with the latter, and that is what is not working correctly.

Thank you.

I see now.

If it helps any, I was at 62k MPR on my new character a moment ago, trained and untrained 2 dexterity, and then dropped to 21k MPR. Pretty big bug...O_o

I was speculating it the very first post (Tezmac MPR bug...) that to calculate the MPR while just training and when next time unlearning there are 2 different algorithms used.

From my post:
" As I stated before, there might be a bug when you train exp (the MPR is not recalculated but just a value is added which somehow corresponds to the amount of exp trained).

But when you untrain, you can't just substract X from the MPR, but the MPR has to be recalculated from scratch.

--Peter back home, November 19 2005 11:40 AM EST "

Jon maybe you could tell us (not the algorithms) but how come when you untrain, the MPR value corrects itself (I assume it is showing the right MPR and someone untrains.)

I have an idea (maybe it is not worth to try it, because might be time costly).
Just writing the algorithm which calculates the MPR from scratch as if it never existed. I don't know how much time it takes, if 20 minutes, it might be worth trying. If it takes hours, then we will have to provide the data to find the bug.

The algorithms seem to exist. Jon is referring to "expensive" in terms of computational cycles & resources.

I am just trying to understand why when you untrain it works correctly.
The understanding could show us some lead what to do when trying to reproduce the bug and finally find the bug so it can be corrected.

About a week ago I untrained about 6000 worth of EC and I lost about 60K mpr....
SInce then I have gained back most of what I lost. Then today when I logged in I had gone for 630K+ mpr down to 585K mpr with out doing anything to my char....

If you look at the history graph for my char terbilmo, you can see the big drop in MPR from untraining a base skill, then you can see me increase my mpr through fighting and training (mostly HP) and then you see a second big drop very recently and I haven't untrained anything. I didn't even train anything when the second drop in MPR occured.

when you untrain it derives the MPR the expensive way.

I will do some real testing tomorrow, if still needed, too tired now.

That is what I was thinking it does (called it: calculates the MPR from scratch).

BTW, do we know when the bug started?
From there we could find out what has been changed and find some relation which could cause the but.

Jon, I am just curious, how much time would it take to write again the algorithm (the cheap one) from beginning?

In fear of the changes for change month, I have not been spending much XP. I've only been training enough BL to keep up with my ToA growth.

When I look at my MPR graph, I expect it should be almost level. I corrected my MPR by training/untraining on 11/17, and Jon correctified me today.

But there is a bubble of growth starting after 11/11 that seems odd. It seems that that was when I first started getting affected anyway. Was there a change on 11/11 that could have introduced the problem?

please help us stupid people...if I have to keep retraining STR, eventually I'm going be in some odd state and end up untraining FB or HP...

To the best of my knowledge this is not a recent bug. I checked a few CB1 characters and found estimated/actual MPR to differ there too.

Is the MPR recalculation really that expensive to do when you train exp in addition to what happens when unlearning?

yes

untraining is relatively rare so I haven't bothered to try to optimize it

Change how you calculate MPR =)

I don't know if this means anything at all, but:

• If I put 10 XP into ST and the rest in FB, train it, and then unlearn the ST, my MPR does not go down.
• If I train max FB, then get a bit more XP and train 10 XP in ST, then unlearn the ST, my MPR will go down.

Also, since I've started an NCB character, I'm noticing that the minor differences in MPR caused by this bug have a pretty significant impact on my battle rewards. I've been doing the unlearn trick each time that I train, so that I get the best rewards. Unlearning may not be so uncommon these days...

Just an idea. There are approximately 200k fights per day and people are usually training after they burn all their 160BA (some train more, some train less). This in fact means 1250 times hitting the train button per day which is once every 70 seconds. Is it very expensive for the processor to calculate after hitting the train button, when there is only 1 train button hit per minute?

1 minion simple strategy: FB + HP each 50%

Before:
HP 20
FB 25 (base level, cost = 8 exp)
(current MPR: 4)

spent 10,000 experience:
HP 824
FB 826
(current MPR: 1,189)

Training 2 ST: cost = 2 exp
(current MPR: 1,189)

Unlearning 2 ST: (should gain 2 exp back)
(current MPR: 1,189)

Result: no change in MPR

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Extending this: starting over and spending 500,000 experience instead:

Before:
HP: 25 (cost = 8 exp)
FB: 25 (base level, cost = 8 exp)
(current MPR: 7)

after training 200,000 experience, half in each of FB and HP:
HP: 11,297
FB: 11,305
(current MPR: 13,058)

training 2 ST: (cost 2 exp)
(current MPR: 13,058)

unlearning 2 ST: (gaining back 2 exp)
(current MPR: 13,058)

Result: no change in MPR

"old style tank test" HP + ST + DX, while having a base FB to check for the MPR change if there is one:


HP: 20
ST: 20
DX: 20
FB: 25 (base level cost = 8 exp)
(current MPR: 4)


Training HP ST and DX, each 1/3rd of the experience, training 100,000 experience total:
HP: 4,243
ST: 4,246
DX: 4,251
FB: 25
(current MPR: 7,500)

Unlearning the FB: (Unlearning for 7 experience)
(current MPR: 7,499)

Result: MPR difference = 1, which is to be expected somewhat from the loss of 8 experience trained in FB

Basic Enchanter: AMF + AS each 1/2 of the exp:

AMF: (base level, cost = 567 exp)
AS: (base level, cost = 91 exp)
(current MPR: 135)

Training 100,000 total experience:
Antimagic Field: 6,158
Ablative Shield: 6,111
(current MPR: 7,538)

Training 2 ST: cost = 2 exp
(current MPR: 7,539)

Unlearning 2 ST: (unlearning for 2 exp)
(current MPR: 7,538)

Result: MPR difference = 1, which should be normal if it is on the edge of a MPR point

Also training => +1 mpr, Unlearning => -1 MPR => normal imo

2 minion test now:

1 enchanter (training nothing, except 2 ST for the test)
1 tank (training HP ST and DX, along with 1/4 of ST as Bloodlust)

I'll try to keep a good track of how much exp this costs but it could be wrong by a few %.


2 base minions:
(current MPR: 1,186) (don't think this is normal since i see 2 minion characters with 1 MPR, but then again i have 10k exp saved on both minions so it could be quite normal)

putting 100k exp in each of HP ST and DX, as well as a level 2825 Bloodlust

HP: 11,300 (cost = 100,000 exp)
ST: 11,300 (cost = 100,000 exp)
DX: 11,300 (cost = 100,000 exp)
BL: 2825 (cost = 20,710 exp)
(current MPR: 19,051)


Training 2 ST on enchanter: cost = 2 exp
(current MPR: 19,052)

Unlearning 2 ST on enchanter: unlearn for 2 exp
(current MPR: 19,051)

MPR difference: 1

While I was testing GentlemanLoser chat mailed me about it perhaps having to do with fighting...

and after these tests i trained 2 DX on my normal character's enchanter and unlearned it, result => quite some MPR loss (~25000)

next thing i will be trying is replicating my own 2 minion character: ET strategy with spells on the enchanter.

I was thinking maybe have an equation that links the amount of trained XP to the MPR of a char (i.e., seeing as the MPR bug has not effected in any way the amount of XP we have trained on our chars). Applying this formula to all the chars would be great seeing as we'd be able to go back to boasting how big our chars are...;)

(i.e., seeing as the MPR bug has not effected in any way the amount of XP we have trained on our chars)

not sure: still need more testing

I really still believe that it has to do with experience inflation during Experience time. Try to fight a little during that time Shade and then see what happens.

draco: it ALSO happens when not in wacky exp time, so has nothing to do with that...

well on my main account i havent untrained anything buy it has seemed to go down in mpr twice now

I hope you mean your main character. Multiple accounts are illegal.

i don't know if this will help , but i had a big drop in my mpr day 22 , when i lost 80k mpr going from 200k to 123k mpr . than i fought a lot and keep training and day 24 i was 153k mpr , and when i logged today ( 25 ) i was 20k mpr lower 133k . Second time my mpr drops , anyway i already lost 100k mpr what is really huge diference , even i don't think this mpr numbers change afects the power of my minions , because i still fighting the same guys i was fighting before when i was 200k mpr .

Instead of trying to derive the total trained XP from all of the stats, why not just maintain a separate stat in the database for total XP? It seems pretty odd to derive that value everytime you train/untrain when it could just as easily be tracked in the database. What's one more field in an SQL record? No big deal. Train 10000XP, add 10000 XP to the total. Unlearn, subtract 10000 (unless MPR is based on untrained XP as well, in which case you subtract like 500 or whatever the % lost is.... but I don't think it's based on that, right?)

The MPR bug has been fixed since about Thursday...

oops yea i ment my main character lol i was thinking about runescape at the time of posting that lol