Given that incapacitation is a thing again, or at least the charge for it, I was wondering what the most efficient way to level agents up would be?
Does it make more sense to do shorter missions and re-visit the game more frequently? Longer missions?
I’ve been trying to time missions such that I don’t send them on an ‘over night’ mission, simply because the next morning they could be useless for 10 hours. Try to do shorter missions and ‘wear them out’ before the end of the day so they are incapacitated over night and you can use them again the next day?
I bought a new agent from the AH, and he seems to be going ‘really’ slow compared to the freebie agent and my one drop agent so far. He’s been on 3 missions and still level 1.
I’m not an expert on this, but various posts seem to suggest that each mission completed bumps up the fatigue counter, and then it rolls an RNG against the current fatigue level to determine if incapacitated. So more frequent missions would likely lead to more time-outs.
The other issue is that at time, agents have not gotten XP for the mission completed if the game crashes when you try to open the Agent window, and/or if you zone between the time the mission completes and you turn it in. Thus, if you are in, say, an instanced mission, and it completes, and then you leave the instance to the normal zone, and now cash it in, you may not receive XP for the mission.
Personally, the Agent system has worked more reliably for me during the past 24 hours than it did previously, with no crashes and all missions giving their XP. So it might be mostly fixed, might be just luck.
I would guesstimate that the ‘fastest’ way to level would be to start a 4 or 8 hour early in the day, which has the highest % chance for the agent, then log on before the end of the day to cash that in and start another. Then just check to make sure you are actually receiving the XP per mission.
Data incomplete, but it looks to me that the best way to do it is to pick long missions, 4 or 8 hours. Then track your Fatigue % with this mod. When the Fatigue gets to about 40-50%, let your Agent be idle for about 4 hours and they will be mostly recovered and can be sent on another few 4/8 hour missions. This cooldown is roughly half of what you have to wait if you become incapacitated.
Edit;
Here are my conclusions from testing and recording this system over the past couple days. (Quoted from my post in that mod thread).
The fatigue findings are very interesting for the purpose of optimization, but I’m wondering about how much this would compensate for the reduced xp to time ratio of 4/8 hour missions. Roughly, 4 hour missions seem to give 33% more xp than 1 hour missions while 8 hour missions seem to give twice as much as 1 hour missions.
If a 1-hour mission gives 100 units of xp:
Running 3 1-hour missions and 4 hours of rest would net the agent 400 xp and 0% fatigue in 7 hours.
Running 2 4-hour missions and no rest would net the agent 266 xp and ~30% fatigue in 8 hours.
Running 1 8-hour mission and no rest would net the agent 200 xp and ~15% fatigue in 8 hours.
I’ll try to put this to test and see how it works out.
Another thing I found odd is both my agents (before I got my 3rd) were fatigued this morning (around 5 am my time) and were supposed to be on a 10 hour cool down. Sometime around 11am (only 6 hours later), they were ready to go. I didn’t expedite anything.
In my case, I happened to look when I bought my 3rd agent, and was surprised to see they only had a half hour left at around 10:30. They didn’t just go away, it somehow accelerated on it’s own.
Now, I was logged out of the game for 4 hours or so. Perhaps it’s speeding up or going double-time when you aren’t in the game?
I don’t understand the reason to use “100 units of xp” for the calculation. I’m not a theorycrafter, so there may be a reason to use this value?
The xp values at T1:
Time in h
XP
XP/min
0,25
180
12.0
1
720
12.0
4
864
3.6
4
960
4.0
8
1280
2.7
8
1536
3.2
My agents have a different rate regarding fatigue: 10 minutes (sometime 8 oder 9 minutes) to lose 1% of fatigue. I got these values by changing their equipment every minute. Is 1% for 5,75 minutes the value for being offline?
My experiments with Fatigue were when I was mostly offline, yeah. So for whatever reason, it appears Fatigue might go down at different rates while online vs offline.
As for the incapacitation timer, I was offline for 113 mintues, and my timer went down by 141 minutes. So something weird is going on there
It’s not a theorycrafting thing, it’s the mathematical idea of coefficients and variables. The unit (variable) scales up through tiers but the ratios (coefficients) remains the same between hours. For the sake of giving a specific example with your sample values from tier 1 (assuming 10% fatigue per mission at tier 1):
Running 4 1-hour missions at 720 xp each and 4 hours of rest would net the agent 2880 xp and ~0% fatigue in 8 hours.
Running 2 4-hour missions at 960 xp each and no rest would net the agent 1920 xp and ~20% fatigue in 8 hours.
Running 1 8-hour mission at 1536 xp each and no rest would net the agent 1536 xp and ~10% fatigue in 8 hours.