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Champions Online Impact Factor (alts metric)I was thinking it would be cool to quantify our accounts as a whole with a single number, taking into account all our alts. People say "I have 3 characters above level 20", etc, but we have no standard way to measure total experience of an account, taking all alts into consideration.
First of all, there is no perfect solution: condensing an entire CO account into a single number inevitably involves a loss of information.
We could add up all the levels of the characters on an account, but that is not too informative since it is too skewed towards having very many low leveled chars. Similarly for taking the average level of the characters on an account, which is oppositely skewed towards accounts with one high level char.
Here is my proposed solution, and I call it the Champions Online Impact Factor (COIF). The COIF of an account is number h between 1 and 8. Here is the definition:
An account has COIF = h if the account has at least h characters of level 5*h.
In case that is hard to understand, it elaborates as:
If you have one character above lvl 5, you have COIF = 1.
If you have two characters above lvl 10, you have COIF = 2.
If you have three characters above lvl 15, you have COIF = 3.
If you have four characters above lvl 20, you have COIF = 4.
If you have five characters above lvl 25, you have COIF = 5.
If you have six characters above lvl 30, you have COIF = 6.
If you have seven characters above lvl 35, you have COIF = 7.
If you have eight characters at lvl 40, you have COIF = 8.
This scheme is quite ingenious, IMO, and I didn't make it up really. This same sysem is used to rank theoretical physicists, where the system is called the h-index (check wiki if you care).
A new player in the millenium city tutorial has COIF 0. By the desert/canada crisis they are COIF 1. Two characters out of the crisis zones is typically COIF 2, or close to it. Then there is a moderate jump to COIF 3, where I would say the person has learned the basics well. COIF 4 and above means 80+ hours in game at the very least, and possibly quite a bit more. Above that is where it gets to be an interesting achievement!
I was partially inspired to make this post by Mr.Funsocks' account with 4 lvl 40s, that is the most I have seen! Funsocks has COIF 5, and will become COIF 6 with just one more lvl 30 (and is close with chars at 24 and 25). I am COIF 4 (as I'm sure many of you must be) and working my way up.
Anyway, this post is not intended to make the devs do anything at all. I just wanted to share this with the community, a standard way to measure the impact of our alts. Feel free to suggest alternatives or improvements to my definition of COIF. The biggest flaw is that people with one super-main are frozen out COIF 1 if they don't like to make alts, even though they may be experts at the game. I am confident that their expertise will shine in other ways though, and COIF is just meant to be a useful measure of alt-making achievement, that condenses the notion of "many characters of at least this level" into a single number.