This past weekend Epic games held an XP event for Gears of War II (GOW II). This game is coming up on its 2 yr anniversary from its release in November 2008. To keep activity going online until GOW 3 is released a year from now, the staff at Epic has been hosting XP events to help players boost their levels up in order to reach the top rank of 100.
I spent probably 12 hours this whole weekend gaming in solely in GOW II. 3 hours Friday, 7 on Saturday and 2 yesterday, at least. You may gawk and wonder why, so do I. To add on to this and make it worse, I’ve been playing this game off and on since it was released. Total, I’m sure I’ve amassed over 500 hours playing this game. As of Sunday night, when I finally shut down the Xbox, I was at rank 96. I still have 4 more ranks to go to the top rank of 100.
My final two missing achievements:
Veteran Gear - 75 G - Reach level 100 and win a match on each of the 4 Snowblind Map Pack maps (Public only)
Seriously 2.0 - 50G - Kill 100,000 enemies (in any mode)
A gamer needs a total of 6,825,825 points to reach level 100. The progression scale for this game is not linear its more of an exponential multiplier. My current score is somewhere around 6,186,400. It’s a guess, but I noticed my progression bar was close to ¾ of the way towards level 97 last I played. In any case you can see I still need more than 600K points to reach the top level. A player's efforts benefit from a few things including 1)your game type you’re playing 2)your personal performance and 3)whether your team wins will help decide your final point tally for that game. On average, as a rough guess, a player may earn 1000 points per game. An average game may take 15-20 minutes. With all this in mind, playing the game on its normal XP set up, it would likely take me 200 more hours of game There is an excellent calculator online here: http://www.markwillis.co.uk/gow2exp/. According to this site, if I played a few matches a week and averaged 12,000 points a week even being rank 96, it would take me over a year to complete the rank progression to reach level 100.
Once, if ever I finish the Veteran Gear achievement I still have to tackle Seriously 2.0. For this I have to reach 100,000 kills in any game mode. My current kill count is just around 17550 kills. 2 years of gaming and over 500 hours, and I’m not even ¼ of the way to 100,000. It's probably a pipe dream that I would ever spend the time to complete that one.
This blog post ties to my last blog one, bad game design. Although achievements are afterthoughts in most game designs, these two achievements are RIDICULOUS! With all the options for gaming and things to do in the world, plus the fact that the average gamer is 32 years old, who in their right mind would spend this much time chasing these achievements (sigh). It's been noted that less than 2% of the Gears of War population have achieved either one of the achievements mentioned in this post. It’s a pretty ridiculous ask of a gamer but truly, maybe this was their plan the whole time. Is that even fair?
I hope like hell no other games coming out in the future tax gamers like this. I’ve know other similar achievements exist for a number of other games out there, so good luck to anyone chasing them down as well.
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