Paradigm shit!

Here's some selected lines :

diana_coman So mircea_popescu for this quality thing as I really don't get it: you have gathering much lower, building lower AND lumberjack lower but then you actually get the q HIGHER?
mircea_popescu Weird huh

diana_coman TBH it doesn't sound right. I can't really quite see how does that make sense.
mircea_popescu I only mine about 122 atm tho. How much do you get ? O nevermind, ranked lj now q 129

diana_coman Oh, I get 131 now ....
mircea_popescu Crrrrrrazy. Maybe lumberjacking's my talent.

diana_coman Or farming is broken, lol

[...]

mircea_popescu Btw diana_coman did you use that lbn ? And no doubt you;ll be pleased to know that lvl 11 lj -> 137q eps. And holy shit lumberjack is hard to level.

diana_coman Very pleased as it makes it such total nonsense that I can happily just leave it to do the map and otherwise go and do something else entirely.
mircea_popescu I'm at 142 now.ⁱ

diana_coman And you are sure that grocery (or lumberjack for that matter) are NOT broken?
mircea_popescu I don't think they are, no.

diana_coman Thing is: if considerably higher skill does jack shit for quality then it's so entirely nonsense that atm I don't know what is there to think really, lol. So will take a break and let it do the map as it does it automatically anyway.
mircea_popescu Paradigm shift!

diana_coman More like paradigm shit. So lol yes, farming > 50 and I get quality 131; what's weirder though is that initially it did rise quite as expected - it's just that it fell like crazy afterwards. So no idea whatsoever. Other then nonsense, lol

This is how we discovered that skills aren't the entire story : while higher skill for a particular character does guarantee a monotonous if not linear increase of the quality he personally obtains, there is no guarantee that higher skills than another characters' actually produce higher quality than that character's!

One possible explanation is obviously that the game is broken. Another possible explanation is that apparently Eulorans have their own talents, so each individual character is more apt for one particular task and less apt for other tasks. That's a revolutionary concept, but if true... then which ? And how could one go about discovering it economically, which is to say in such a way that makes him a profit rather than a loss ? And for that matter, how does one go about discovering that timely, which is to say before a few centuries are out ? Perhaps that pile of skills that used to be displayed in the first tab of the skill page had anything to do with it ? Were we the clever sort of folk that wrote it all down ? Hopefully this is a significant piece of game mechanics, that will see further elucidations from MiniGame in the future, perhaps even in the shape of who knows what ? Maybe a fate reader!

But for that matter - do we even know whether quality actually is a good thing ?

signed, Mircea Mircescu & the questions factory.

1. My other non-basics are 106. Lumberjack at 14 produces EPS q 147 now ; it produced 142 at 12 and in general up util now about 3 quality points per level. [↩]