General

Your opinion on pre bb 200s

Saw this post on SP and i thought i'd share it with basil. This is a rant from a pre-bb 200(heroofstarz i think). He was upset that the level cap is being raised to 250 and his rant really highlighted the difficulty and sacrifice required to reach 200 back then.
The post begins

There is a reason why most of us players who did what we did to get our ranks are frustrated. I'm going to share 2 stories from my own personal experience. First ill introduce myself. I'm the rank 2 player in my server and ranked 39 in gms (should be 40 but i guess someone's char got deleted) And my pirate is the rank 329th overall (should be 333) and ranked 33rd in my server Khaini. Personally i am a bit frustrated by this because of all the work put into the game. And before i begin my story i can't begin to imagine how many insane stories other old veteran players might have had. On the other hand i'm a little excited only because i love challenges.

My first story was when i was training my bishop at the 15x lvls at himes before 4th job was even released. I raced my friend chris to see who can get the most experience in a day. We trained 20 hours on 2x cards and 2 of those hours were 4x because of the yearly thanksgiving event. We were lucky to get 2 events in a year back then. we both made 150m exp that day and thats about how much exp it took to lvl at 150, he was lvl 167 at the time.

The second story was when i trained my Buccanner. Pirates came out 2 months after my bishop reached 200 back in 2008. I took part in the race for the top rank pirate in gms. I ended up as the 5th rank and 1st in my server. I kept losing internet for 2 weeks at a time back then because we never payed the bills. In total i probably lost about 2 month of time i could have been training. Anyway the last time i lost my internet i was the 4th rank pirate in gms. after i got my internet back i was the 7th rank and at lvl 190. At that point i started training 23 hours a day instead of 20. I had 1 hour worth of sleep and made my siblings wake me up. If i couldnt wake up i would take my finger and bite it as hard as i can until i did. i made it to the 5th rank and the 6th rank person was on my tail. Funny thing is i lost my internet when i was lvl 199 and 99.98% so i went over to my cousins house downloaded the game and just lvled as quick as i could. People were suprised that i had not one but two lvl 200's back then. It took about 6 months of nonstop training but the satisfaction was great. BTW just so you know i wasn't in great health after training 23 hours for 2 weeks i looked like i was on the verge of death.

After all that over time level 200 became a joke. There was no more satisfaction of being 200. Honestly a person who reaches lvl 200 now would probably be lvl 90 back then. Now the cap is being removed undermining all that work. It's as if 3 years of wasting your time training to get to 200 has been replaced with a 1 week effort. Do we receive any compensation? no. But that's right we don't play anymore so we don't deserve those ranks. But the truth is that's all we have left to show for the wasted 3 years of effort now there is nothing left except stories.

But there is a reason why our generation died out. The game is nothing like it was 4 years ago. It's true i kept my rank for 5 years. But yeah hopefully these stories serve as a wake up call. Who knows how the game is going to turn out 5 years from now. would be nice if they kept the old ranks but i doubt it matters. But part of me is also actually excited. Either ill join the race to 250 or ill just do it just to accomplish .

Things i regret: Spending 3 years to accomplish something that later became undermined.
Things i do not regret: Meeting a handful of friends like Dan who i see twice a year now.

[b]I wanted to get Basil's opinion on this. Though, i understand his frustration and it's rather justified. However after reading this, it really made me wonder if reaching 200 pre-bb really was something to be awestruck over. If you took the time to read this, do you think reaching 200 pre bb was worthy of the respect and admiration it brought?[/b]

TL;DR: Rank 1 player invests many hours to create two level 200's pre bb, even putting his health at risk.