I have seen too many people gripe and complain about Loyalty Ranks ever since they realized that the purchase of Aurum greatly affected how quickly one moved up the ranks, and I’m so sick of it. Both my mind and my stomach begin to physically hurt when I see a forum post with somebody complaining about the system. The debates, poop flinging, and complaint threads have only begun to grow now that CCP Rattati has announced that Loyalty Rank 4 will be required for all trading. In this post, I plan on laying out the problems that I see the DUST 514 community has with the system, and also providing some solutions that I have seen the community present in various forum posts.
Ever since the release of the Loyalty Ranks in Uprising 1.9, back in November, there has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding them. In the official Dev Blog for Uprising 1.9, the description says that “your character will gain a Loyalty Rank based on your Lifetime Battles, Wins, War Points, and Aurum spent”. After further analysis done by the community in this forum post, they determined that purchasing Aurum played a crucial role in advancing through the Loyalty Ranks. We the players thought that “Lifetime Battles, Wins, War Points, and Aurum spent” would be represented as an equal percentage in the formula to generate a player’s Loyalty Rank.
That is not the case. I asked Soraya Xel and Cat Merc about the logic used to calculate the Loyalty Rank. “It’d be impossible for Aurum to be a significant percentage of my LR at the rate it’s been clocked, which is like 2 LRP per AUR or something,” Soraya told me. He also stated that, “I think the daily login is a huge part, if you have it really heavily stacked up”. Cat Merc also responded by saying that he thought “a single match win is like 3LRP”. On the subject of the Aurum to Loyalty Rank point conversion rate, Cat said, “4000 LRP per dollar”. Cat Merc went on to use an example of another player who “spent 70 pounds + 5000 hours into the game…and has more than 20x my WP amount”. Cat Merc is currently Loyalty Rank 10, and the mercenary whom he was comparing to is Loyalty Rank 8. Further making a point, he told me, “I spent about 20 dollar/mo on DUST since I started playing. I totaled it up and I estimate about 400 dollars at the minimum from the purchases I remember. I think something is wrong here”. Clearly there is something wrong here. If the player that Cat Merc used in his example has only spent 70 pounds ($104.71 USD) and has better stats then she deserves the higher rank, because she has put way more time into the game than Cat Merc. Cross Atu, who is infamous for doing rigorous testings of features and making spreadsheets, jumped into the conversation out of nowhere with his findings on how Loyalty Rank points are distributed. He found that 1 Aurum is equivalent to 2 LRP, 1 match is equivalent to 1 LRP, and 1 win equals 3 LRP (added to the 1 LRP for doing a match). Daily login rewards 5 LRP (just as Soraya Xel suspected) and about 1 LRP is awarded per 500 War Points. If this is the formula (and I suspect it’s rather accurate because Cross is quite meticulous about his tests), why are people giving so much flak to Aurum? I believe it is safe to say because Aurum is bought in bulk. Nobody is buying 50 Aurum. They are buying hundreds of thousands of Aurum which is being multiplied by 2, therefore giving them massive amounts of Loyalty Rank points.
The community seems to think that the formula is 10% Lifetime Battles, 10% Wins, 10% War Points, and 70% Aurum spent. The feeling of 70% Aurum spent is what people have a problem with. They do not want to buy Aurum (which in turn supports the game, so why wouldn’t you? Another topic for another time though). Because they do not want to buy Aurum, they complain because they feel that they are not advancing as fast as they would like to be. So, in short, people’s two main problems with Loyalty Ranks seem to be that they do not want to buy the Aurum to advance in the ranks and reap the benefits, and they feel they are not being rewarded, in the form of a Loyalty Rank, or even Loyalty Rank points, by actually playing the game. Another thing that I personally find rather annoying about the system is that it cannot decide how many Loyalty Rank points I have until the next rank. On my main, Aiwha Bait, I am Rank 4. If I log on one day, it may say I have thirteen thousand and some-odd points until the next level, but then when I log on the next day, it may say I have twenty thousand and some-odd points until the next level. It’s annoying that it fluctuates every day, and cannot accurately tell me how many points away from the next rank I am.
Enter the brilliant people on the forums who spend hours, and even days, talking about how to fix these problems. User Harpyja has suggested a system that sounds similar to EVE Online’s Loyalty Point to ISK conversion system. Harpyja proposes being able to exchange 1 million ISK for 25 Loyalty Rank points. 501st Headstrong suggested, in the same thread, allowing players to exchange their Loyalty Points from Factional Warfare for the Loyalty Rank points, though he did not say how many Loyalty Points he thought would be an appropriate amount. Thankfully, Terry Webber pointed out the elephant in the room concerning Harpyja’s suggestion; people with boatloads of ISK would just pour their money into maxing out their Loyalty Rank. Vell0cet was quick to reply to the whole tread saying, “The whole point of this is to prevent players from setting up farming alt accounts. The LP requirement indicates that the account has earned it’s rank. Very rich players could transfer ISK to alt accounts to set up warbarge farms with your proposal. This would in-turn get them more ISK and allow them to add even more accounts. It could balloon out of control”. He went on to say that, “A better solution is to simply tweak the formula to reward participation more”. While I like the idea of tweaking the formula (and I am sure the DUST community would much appreciate that), I am also not opposed to the idea of allowing players to exchange X number of Factional Warfare points for X number of Loyalty Rank points. This would prevent people from setting up the alt-farms on secondary accounts, because in order to gain Factional Warfare points, one must actively participate in Factional battles.
Cross Atu also suggested giving players “a daily AUR earning of some kind”. Whether that would be in the form of daily missions, a daily login bonus (on top of the Skill Points that are awarded each day), or a special Warbarge subsystem that generated 1 Aurum a day, would be up to CCP Rattati.
These are only a handful of the many wonderful (and not so wonderful) suggestions that the community has thought up of how to balance this hot issue. If you have any other suggestions (or would like to build upon on the propositions in this post), please post it in the comments below, hit me up on Twitter, or mail me in game! I would love to hear everybody’s thoughts on the topic.
