Bonus XP Weekend/March 2010

The bonus XP weekend is an event that started on 12:00PM GMT Friday, 12 March 2010 and will last until 12:00PM GMT Monday, 15 March 2010. During this event, players can gain a significant amount of extra experience for the first ten hours of their personal gameplay time. This event is members only, but members can participate on free-to-play worlds.

Mechanics


When players initially log in on the weekend, they will gain approximately 2.7 times the usual rate for all "normal" training activities (Or an average of 1.63 times the normal experience gained for the first 10 hours). While logged in, a timer will be running over the time the player is logged into the game. The bonus will decrease over time to a minimum of 1.1 times the usual rate.

The experience rate is shown in-game over the course of the weekend. Players have access to an interface showing a running total of the extra experience they've earned, over what they would have normally earned, as well as the amount of time they have been logged in. The bonus XP rate will not decrease when the player is not logged into the game.

The amount of random events a player receives when the bonus modifier is in effect is greatly increased. Some players experienced as many as four random events within the first half-hour of play. This indicates that random events are based on an XP gain formula.

Bonus
The XP multiplier initiallys about 2.777x the normal xp rate, but decreases to 1.1x over 10 hours of gameplay. Any experience gained after 10 hours has a multiplier of 1.1.

The formula is: $$\left(\frac{x-10}{7.5}\right)^2+1.1$$ for the domain 0<x<10 and where x is the number of hours played.

Limitations
The bonus XP rate does not affect XP gained from quest rewards, XP items (such as genie lamps), or XP gained on a point by point basis (such as Penguin Points). Furthermore, the effect of Sacred Clay items, Penance horns, and brawling gloves does not stack with the bonus XP rate. Those items can be used without any degradation or potential decrease.

Gilded altars do not give their extra experience per bone during the weekend - they preform at less than the usual rate. Also, Ectofuntus, which usually gives quadruple prayer experience per bone, is excluded from the Bonus XP weekend, so will continue to perform at 4xXP.



Strategy
To optimise the benefit the basic strategy is to prepare items in advance - acquiring ores, bars, tertiary ingredients, charms and so forth, then processing these as fast as possible. Detail depends on the player's preferences, for example: If overall gain (towards all 99s, say) is the goal benefit from individual activities is better measure in time saved than in XP:
 * 1) Achieving a particular XP/level goal in some skill or skills
 * 2) Optimising net XP earned
 * 3) Minimising a disliked task
 * 4) Saving money
 * 5) Saving time

Effective multiplier = (multiplier x (prep time + skilling time) - (prep time)/skilling time

So for the basic extractive skills, combat, runecrafting where prep time is virtually nil, the benefit is simply the multiplier, whereas for summoning collecting the charms probably takes 10 times as long as crafting pouches so the effective multiplier would be 11 instead of 2 : (2 x (10+1) - 10)/1.

On this basis summoning is the optimal skill to train since its preparation ratio is largest, and not buyable.

To gain maximum XP however by boosting farming one might:
 * 1) Log on 12:00 Friday, check, cut and replant all trees, log off
 * 2) Log on 12:00 Saturday, check, cut and replant all trees, log off
 * 3) Log on 12:00 Sunday, check all trees. (Continue with any other tasks having used a fairly small amount of the time.)

This could provide several 100k xp, but the time saving is fairly minimal. On the other hand double value has been had from potentially expensive seeds, saving maybe millions of coins.

Prayer is pretty much cheaper and faster at a player owned house without the bonus XP than normal burying (figures based on 2x).

Slayer is a candidate skill because both slayer and combat skills will be bonused.

If you are a low level member and you still have Ancient Bones you can bury them for a massive 540 exp each.

For high-level runecrafting since ZMI and Graahk methods have conflicting benefits normally, ZMI generally reckoned to be superior in XP, Graahk clearly the leader in coins, players who use both should dedicate this time to ZMI to maximise the XP benefit. Wealthy players, especially those with lower runecrafting should be looking to bind tiaras.

Trivia

 * When the event was released, players noticed the bonus xp was less than the announced bonus xp at a given time. This was due to a bug. After investigation, Jagex decided not to fix this bug as the rounding error was maximum 0.15 at the beginning, and became smaller as the event evolved, with a finishing error of 0% after 10 hours.
 * Rumours were started that the real reason for Jagex incorporating the Bonus XP Weekend was so they could monitor those who were training skills for hours without stopping to help prevent the use of autobotting.