Ok, for those of you that don’t know, I play Planetside. It’s an MMOFPS and I wrote a review about it all of 2 weeks ago (and have blogged about it numerous times). As previously noted, I’ve been playing the game on and off for all 5 years it has been out. John has been playing on and off for about 2 years. He’s much less serious about it than I was when I was really into it, but he’s already Battle Rank (BR) 14. I got to about the same rank the first year I played, however, you can experience a much quicker advancement if you’re more serious than us, and especially if you actually KILL things. The one major difference between John and I, was that in that first year I also got to Command Rank 4.
Last night I finally hit my “goal” of the last 5 years — I got Command Rank 5. It shouldn’t have taken me this long, but every time I got out of the game, getting back in took a bit of time. Mostly to get back up to my old skill level, but also to earn enough respect and, more importantly, enough seniority to get Squad Leader. To achieve CR5 takes a fair bit of Command Experience Points (CEP). In the “old days” (when I got CR4), almost every base capture was worth 5,000 BEP (which was translated into CEP if you were squad leader) or close to it, which equates out to over 60 base captures to get the 300k CEP necessary for CR4. Sometime thereafter SOE changed the system to be much more variable. However, they did attempt to explain it in a page long head-ache inducing post. Since then CEP from base captures has been much less on the average. I’ve seen regular captures be worth as little as 1,000 CEP (occasionally even less). For many years of play the most I ever saw for a base capture was 4k, though with this recent batch of play I’ve seen as high as 10,000 CEP (extremely rare, but still possible).
As the title of this article indicates, after several weeks of hard playing and lots of squad leading, I’ve gotten my very own CR5. I now have the ability to call down large Orbital Strikes, and send global messages to all the players on my “side” (VS FTW!). I hate the CR5’s who abuse global (of which there seems to be a dozen or so that are extremely vocal); it has gotten to the point in which “CR5” has been a bad word in my book.
“I’ve spent my whole life stickin’ it to the Man. If I do this, I’ll be the Man. I don’t think I can be the Man.”. —Jack O’Neill (on becoming a Brigadier General).