Oblivion talk:Athletics

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

[edit] Swimming against an Object Does Increase Athletics

This page says swimming against an object will not increase Athletics. But I have found that to be false. I set my character to auto-run and had it swim against a rock in a pond right beside Cheydinhal. I saw the Athletics skill increase until it gained another level. -- Jargon 05:29, 27 December 2006 (EST)

I did more experiments on swimming against an object in the river inside Bravil. Athletics is a minor skill in my character's class specialization. Since my character's Athletics was at level 70 during the experiment, the required experience points to reach the next level is 113.6. Since swimming gains 0.04 experience points per second, swimming for 10 minutes would gain 24 experience points, which is almost 1/4 of the way from level 70 to level 71. So I set my character to auto-swim against a rock for 10 minutes. And voila! The Athletics progress bar moved forward almost 1/4 of the way to level 71. I did the same test auto-swimming against the wall beside the Bravil river gate and got a similar result. This proves again that auto-swimming against an object does increase the Athletics skill as swimming that covers distance would. -- Jargon 07:16, 28 December 2006 (EST)

I did still one more experiment auto-swimming against a wall in Cheydinhal. My character was about 1/4 away from reaching level 75 (Expert) in Athletics. My rough estimate was that it would take around 15 minutes of swimming to reach the Expert level. My estimate turned out to be right on the dot. After 15 minutes of auto-swimming against a wall, the Expert level congratulations box appeared.

I also did an experiment auto-running against a rock and my character gained a level in Athletics.

That's it! I'm deleting those erroneous "running/swimming against an object does not increase Athletics" statements. I was just wondering why someone put those statements there.

By the way, in the past, I had been able to achieve the Master level in Athletics by swimming against an object. I used the original unpatched version of Oblivion then. Since I now use the patched version, I performed these experiments to verify that running/swimming against an object still works in the latest version. -- Jargon 21:40, 9 January 2007 (EST)

Here's a monkey wrench that I'll throw into the works: I tried the same trick, but wired my controller thumbstick so the character ran backwards against a wall for several minutes. My Athletics did not appear to increase (from Level 68, less than what was mentioned above). I'm wondering if it counts only if you run/swim forward, not backwards. With an XBox 360 controller, it's easier to band the stick down rather than up, so an XBox user is more likely to lock a character into moving backwards for Athletics/Sneak cheesing. Perhaps this is where all the contention lies.Dark Spark 00:47, 16 December 2007 (EST)