I bought this game in beta, and have been gone for 3.5 years. So pardon me if I'm a bit rusty on the leveling techniques of late.
After a year of play I had a handful of level 30ish characters. I lost interest, and moved on to other games.
The best way to level that I was aware of back in the day was to use a SK and put them WAY out of XP range using a possible loophole/exploit what ever you want to call it. Anyway... The end result was the person getting leveled got normal XP, and the leveler was half way across the world and tada!!! Power levels!
It was pretty time consuming and tedious, and of course you needed a high level person to kill high level mobs, and a BIG zone to get the range thing to work right.
I reported it because I discovered it on accident, and I think the patched it. And in a nut shell, you could get 10 or 20 levels in a hurry. But because my highest guy was in his 30s, breaking 30 for me was nearly impossible using this method for days and days on end.
Anyway.
The com officer leveling is easily 4x faster, and ANYONE can do it. Starting at level 1 to 35 in a 4-5 hour session. From 35 to 50 in a second 4-5 hour session.
So you go from 1 to 50 in about 8-10 hours. (1 long day of weekend play.)
This current 'farm' method is WAY faster than any 'genuine' exploit I've ever seen in this or any other online game.
I remember being proud of AE farming in EQ, and getting 1 level in about 4 hours!!!
Com officers are pretty out of whack. I've been gone for a long time like I said, and I was astounded I could get 50 in just 2 days of play after work.
I was like OMGWTFBBQ!?!?!?!?!
I'm a farmer... I love to try and find good farm missions and reset them over and over. Grind up the XP and feel like I'm 'winning' but the com officer thing is well beyond 'farming'.
When people are getting 10k a pull and say... "Man this is slow, I'm only getting 1600 a kill." You know the bar has been raised pretty high.
If they just handed EVERY ACCOUNT a level 50 EVERY WEEK for free, no effort. It would actually be SIGNIFICANTLY slower than the current AE methods.
