Reviewing Renown Ranks

When Galactic Command turned into Renown with Onslaught, that never-ending, not-quite-XP bar became a lot less important as a source of gear, and since your Renown rank didn't actually affect the level of gear you got our of your reward boxes anymore, there's been a lot less incentive to care about levelling it up ever since. Mind you, I still like making numbers go up, and there were multiple achievements to be had for getting every class to 100, and one character to the max of 999.

With how intensely I played at the start of Onslaught, the first 100 Renown ranks on my Commando flew by in no time, and I even missed it when I got the achievement for hitting rank 100 because I was too busy actually playing. (Or maybe it was a technical issue at the time? All I remember for sure is that I was somewhat disappointed when I realised that I'd failed to capture the big ding.)

The first couple of alts followed reasonably quickly as well, but after that my efforts became increasingly... scattered. For example it took me nearly a year to get an inquisitor to renown 100 because the class is not among my most frequently played, but also because I have several at max level and kept swapping between them. I was happy for my guildies when they hit their own milestones and earned the "Everybody Knows My Name" legacy title for hitting 100 on all classes, but even though I kind of wanted that achievement as well I just didn't want it quite enough, always preferring to hop on different alts all the time to work on their Conquest scores.

It was therefore only last month that I logged on one night and finally hit renown rank 100 on one of my multiple bounty hunters, the last class I was still missing for the achievement. Alas, not even one guildie was online to witness it, but it was still something.

Up next is the one to hit rank 999 on my main. Again, based on how quickly I burned through the levels at the start of the expansion, I should've already achieved it, but in practice my Commando main is still somewhere in the mid-500s. If I added up all the Renown ranks across my legacy though, I'd already be at more than 2000, so it's not as if I haven't been playing... also, unlike with the class-related achievement, I haven't seen many lay claim to having reached the 999th Renown rank, so I feel somewhat less behind the curve on that one.

Of course, this is all in the context of being surrounded by my guildies, most of whom are pretty hardcore in terms of how much time they spend in the game. I posted a poll on Twitter the other day to ask other players about their highest Renown rank at this point, and somewhat to my surprise, even more than a year after the system's launch almost 30% of respondents still said that they had yet to progress beyond rank 50 on any character.

Before Onslaught's launch, there was talk of having "seasons" for Renown ranks and the suggestion that they would reset every so often, which was one of those things at the back of my mind putting a bit of FOMO pressure on me to get that rank 999 achievement done sooner rather than later. We haven't heard anything about that since the system was actually implemented though, and based on those poll numbers I guess Bioware isn't feeling a particular rush to reset the numbers. Hopefully that means that I can continue to take my time (relatively speaking) and still get there in the end.