Mounts Steal My Experience, Don’t They?

One of the widespread myths about mounts is the one about dragoturkeys stealing battle experience. Is that really true? Let’s start from the very beginning.

Mounts gain experience if they participate in a battle, i.e. they gain experience when their owners actually ride them during the fight. But dragoturkeys learn nothing if they were left near the battle field. I wish they could become more battle proficient just watching the fight, this way I could train them faster.

Next important point is that dragoturkeys gain experience regardlessly the effort of the rider. If the owner doesn’t want to help the mount to learn faster, the latter will gain experience equal to one fifth of the rider’s experience. Perhaps dragoturkeys are five times stupider than people, of course, if we do not count iops. Anyway, these battle skills are gained by mounts themselves, they are not stolen from the rider. Even thought of stealing skills is ridiculous. Can you imagine someone stealing your skill of wielding the sword?

The process of learning can be greatly accelerated if the rider decides to contribute to it, i.e. instead of analysing own moves and tactics rider pays attention to the mount’s performance during the fight. When all the dirty work is done the rider transmits his knowledge to dragoturkey. Of course, in this case rider’s receives less experience from the fight as he hasn’t paid enough attention to his own performance. Basically it’s what I do when I train mounts: 90% of my attention I pay to a bird and only 10% to myself. I don’t learn much about my strategy and tactics, however, I can improve birdies skills faster.

Now let’s return to the myth in question. Many people these days say they believe mounts “steal” their experience. And no matter how ridiculous it may sound, I can see where it comes from. First reason is that as I said earlier mounts learn by themselves, and people think that mounts are so stupid that they can’t gain any knowledge on their own. Very “iopish” line of reasoning if you ask me. Second possible reason is that while people can see how their skills grow after each battle they have little to no idea how the learning works. Therefore once they saw their experience when riding a mount a bit lower than usual they blame a poor bird without even trying to analyze the situation.

I asked cra to help me with the research: she is the fastest in killing bow meows and rats living on the streets of Frigost village. Why these creatures were selected for the experiment? Because they are easy to find, they can be seen and fought alone, and they are strong enough for cra to learn something, but not too strong to make a fight too long. Hence they were ideal subjects of my little experiment. Cra killed about 35 monsters: she didn’t complete any challenges, the only difference in equipment she used was mount/pet. Half of the fights she did riding a mount (she didn’t work on mount learning, a bird was left on her own) and the rest of them with the water bwak. All the results of each fight were written down. After examination of the results only fights with the identical monsters were left for further analysis (28 in total). The documented results can be found here.

According to the results of the fights dragoturkeys do not steal experience: it was almost the same with or without a bird. However, I noticed one interesting detail — the experience is not static. Currently existing learning theories take into account monster’s and fighter’s battling skills and bonuses like challenges, stars, and wisdom of the fighter. These theories also assume that the base amount of experience is fixed. Even with such a small sample like mine I can suggest that the authors of these theories overlooked some variables that also affect learning. Even though facts indicate that some additional factors may exist their role isn’t that important.