On a related metter, a couple of days ago I got to wondering how big the voting bonus really was. An Acolyte gets 8 votes per day, so it's easy to see that the Acolyte can expect to acquire an extra 2 XP from casting votes. (Not counting an additional bonus of 2 XP for using them all up.) But the 2XP is really a 25% chance of 1 XP for each vote, so the Acolyte might be lucky and get more XP, or unlucky and get none at all.

my $n = shift || 8;
my $p = shift || .25;

for ($i=0; $i<=$n; ++$i) {
  my $prob = choose($n,$i) * ($p**$i) * ((1-$p)**($n-$i));
  $x += $i * $prob;
  $tp += $prob;
  printf "%2d %.4f\t(%.4f)\n", $i, $prob, 1-$tp;
}
print "Expected: $x\n";

sub choose {
  my ($n, $r) = @_;
  return 0 if $n < 0 || $r < 0 || $r > $n;
  return 1 if $r == 0 || $r == $n;
  return choose($n-1,$r-1) * $n / $r;
}
[download]

 0 0.1001       (0.8999)
 1 0.2670       (0.6329)
 2 0.3115       (0.3215)
 3 0.2076       (0.1138)
 4 0.0865       (0.0273)
 5 0.0231       (0.0042)
 6 0.0038       (0.0004)
 7 0.0004       (0.0000)
 8 0.0000       (0.0000)
Expected: 2
[download]

The chances fall off pretty quickly as the number of points increase, but still about one Acolyte in 11 can expect to get 4 XP from casting votes instead of only 2 XP on a given day.

All very true, but perhaps not as significant as it seems. While any given day you may get up to 1 XP per vote while others you get 0, in order to get enough votes to go up a level, you need more then one days worth of voting. As such, over a large number of votes, it will most likely average about 1/4 XP per vote. Because of the randomness factor there will always be local variation and noise, but over a large number of votes, it will average out.

BTW, nice program, and thanks for bringing Perl into our discussion.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...