For those who are interested in the Halp Reach ranks and what's yet to come from the developers themselves. Enjoy
Credit Report
By now you’re all aware that there’s a limit on the level you can currently achieve in Reach. Based on the amount of noise and concern coming from the community I figured that the vast majority of you have already run face first into this virtual ceiling. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turns out, over 70% of the entire population is still at Warrant Officer or below. In fact, the amount of active players who are currently sitting at the level cap is less than 1% of everyone playing Reach.
I figured many of you would like to see how your current rank stacks up against the entire community at large so Jacob Miner, one of our infrastructure engineers and stats gurus, whipped up this quick chart for me:
Note that “Private A” is what’s known in-game as “Private Grade 1”, “Warrant Officer A” is “Warrant Officer Grade 1” and so on.
I just personally hit Major yesterday so I’m sitting in the upper echelons of the top 97% of our player base for virtual-ranks-with-no-tangible-real-value! I feel… special. This chart also shows what most of you already know – climbing the Warrant Officer Mountain is a monumental feat!
Luke Smith, the player investment designer for Reach, noticed this too, “Yes, Warrant Officer is a long stretch of gameplay so it’s not much of a surprise that there are a lot of folks still making their way to Captain.” There’s hope though. As Luke explains, “as some of you have found out – once you get to Captain it speeds up again.” Yes I can personally attest to this – once you finally get past WO Grade 3, its smooth sailing and downhill (mostly) from there.
So, what about that level cap then? I asked Luke to shed some light on the issue.
I’m at or near the current rank cap. Please say it’s being raised soon?
Luke: “We definitely have a plan for raising the cap and when those details can be shared, they’ll happily be conveyed here on Bungie.net. As far as “soon” goes, that’s a term that is pretty vague, so I guess your mileage may vary depending on what “soon” means to you.”
Once I hit the level cap, what’s going to happen to the credits that I continue to earn?
Luke: “Nothing, you’re still earning credits once you hit the cap and they are still counting towards your next rank. So, once the level cap is lifted, some players will shoot off into other ranks and get access to new stuff.”
Ok, so why is there a level cap in the first place?
Luke: “There’s a level cap in place for a number of reasons.
First, security: We’ve seen a bunch of games come and go where investment systems got exploited and broken early, completely throwing off the game economy (even though Reach progression is aesthetic only, it’s still important to us to preserve the ecosystem to the best of our ability) so one reason was certainly security. To use a hyperbolic example: If it turned out that teabagging players was giving mountains of Credits (try it, it gives nothing!), we’d have a failsafe in place to make a fix and continue the progression path
Second: We had some ideas on cool ways to lift it via communal effort.”
We should hopefully have more news to share on those “cool communal efforts” very soon and if I were a betting man I’d say that the current cap will be lifted in the next month or two, give or take. In the meantime that gives 99% of you plenty of time to continue playing, ranking up and banking credits while of course, most importantly, just continuing to have fun.
