In interests of knowing how xp/sk works in order to have an effective leveling strategy, I wanted to retest a theory I had tested previously(http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showpost.php?p=6010885), the theory being that once you hit 200, if you're putting the SK into research instead of into levelling, the amount of SK that goes into research is actually unaffected by faction, even if it appears so. This is different to if you were putting that SK into levelling, where the amount of relevant faction you have definitely affects what goes into your levelling bar.
In that original test, I had originally tested with level 1 and level 2 researches, where it was easy to find mobs that would cap the research for those levels. In this new test, I was testing with level 9 researches, which cap at 37k SK(requiring 740k SK to ding a full level 9 research level). I had a shade at level 215, with a couple of level 10s opened up, and a few level 9s which were completely untouched, ie. no SK had ever been put into them.
My faction was 49650 out of 50000, which means I'm getting 99.3% of the full SK I would have got if I had full faction. At 215, daily rewards are worth around 61k if I remember right, which is much more than the research cap for level 9 when I set it to 100% research. What I did was I had a completely empty level 9 research I dedicated completely to testing this theory, and I did 3 dailies a day(1 elite, 1 normal, 1 pvp), and everytime I handed the mish in, I switched my research 100% to this level 9 research so that this research level would only be filled by daily mish rewards which would cap. Any other time in game, I had my research target set to another research line, so that I wouldn't get random sk going to the research I had set aside for testing this. I kept track of how many times I got a daily mish reward and when in a spreadsheet, so I wouldn't lose track.
The result of this testing was that, after having handed in 20 daily mish rewards(ie. I got "36741 SK went to your research" 20 times), I dinged my level 9 research! This can only have happened if instead of receiving 36741 SK each time I got a daily mish reward, I had actually received the full 37k 20 times in order to reach a target SK level of 740k SK to ding a level 9 research.
Conclusion of this is that Research levelling is actually calculated in amount of xp(unaffected by faction), rather than SK. The message that the game gives you "xxx SK went to your research" is a nominal amount of XP which has been converted to SK, with faction affecting that calculation for display purposes, but the ACTUAL amount of XP which has actually gone into the research level is unaffected by faction.
Theoretically, you could have a high level character(eg. 220) doing research with little to no faction, and this wouldn't affect the amount that actually goes into research, even if the game tells you you only a tiny bit of your SK went into research. eg. a 220 char with say 2k faction does a daily and puts it 100% into a level 9 research, the game will say "1480 SK has gone into your research" when handed in, yet the reality is, the full cap of 37k SK(or 37 000 000 000 xp) has gone into the research instead.