Bonus XP Weekend/March 2010

The bonus XP weekend is an event that started at noon 12:00PM GMT Friday, 12 March 2010 and will last until noon 12:00PM GMT Monday, 15 March 2010. During this event, players can gain a significant amount of extra experience for the first seven 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 five 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.

However, the above formula and graph were withdrawn from the developer blog as the actual curve followed was somewhat flatter than the published one, and the in-game bonus XP rate doesn't follow that equation smoothly. The following table shows how much bonus XP you can expect after a certain amount of play time.

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.

Goldsmithing gauntlets do not work during the bonus XP weekend. Gold ore smelted using the gauntlets will be the same as gold ore smelted without. This gives a smelting XP rate of 22.5 XP per ore times the multiplier.

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.

NOTE! IMPORTANT ABOUT PRAYER!

Do no train at the Gilded altar because: for example Dragon Bones, you'd usually get 3,5 times more xp, but, since that doesn't work today, you'll get only what the xp weekend offers you (for example 2,7 times xp instead of 3,5)!!!!! So you are wasting money!



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 hundreds of thousands of 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).

Ancient Bones can be buried for 540 exp each.

Slayer is an apparent candidate skill because both slayer and combat skills will be bonused. However this benefit is illusory, the saving is purely in time and as slayer generally yields money, time would be better spent in loss making skills.

For Herblore the best method is to make the highest potions possible and regress to lower potions as supplies deplete. Making a potion high or low level takes the same amount of time the only difference being how much xp gained. Since the Weekend Bonus will eventually go down, making the better potion will yield the better bonus. Keep in mind that by gaining levels more potions may be unlocked for herbs.

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 maximize the XP benefit. Similarly woodcutters who mix Ivy and tree cutting, should choose this time for Ivy cutting, however if they are also fire-makers they would do better still by burning logs which would normally be considered too expensive for the XP gained.

Effect on market
The Grand Exchange market mechanisms were not able to respond quickly enough to the massive surge in demand for precursor items.

Consequently the market sold out of many items, such as magic, yew and eucalytpus logs, most tertiary summoning components (such as tinderboxes, raw beef, uncooked bird meat was trading off exchange for 2k, however less used items such as steel bars were still available), and many other items.

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.
 * A glitch occurred, that when you would try to buy something in a shop without any coins, the Bonus XP counter would add 45 xp, but the amount of earned xp since your last login wouldn't rise. This hasn't been fixed yet.