It’s time to suit up and get your murder on the battlegrounds of sci-fi shooter DUST 514. Between March 14th downtime and March 17th downtime, Icelandic developer CCP is putting the ‘Million Clone Challenge’ out to the community.
The premise is simple, any merc who can kill 1 million enemies within those four days will earn 1 million skill points to train up their skills. I’m kidding of course, the challenge is for the community as a whole and is open to all active players. There are four possible payouts depending on just how many clones end up destroyed:
• For 250,000 clones destroyed, all active players will receive 250,000 skill points.
• For 500,000 clones destroyed, all active players will receive 500,000 skill points.
• For 750,000 clones destroyed, all active players will receive 750,000 skill points.
• For 1,000,000 clones destroyed, all active players will receive 1,000,000 skill points.
There are some rules to abide by however:
• Only the total number of clones destroyed during the event will be counted, not the number of kills — this means if you revive someone, it’s not counted. They have to lose it.
• Clone kills by friendly fire will not be counted — so basically no teammate farming in Factional Warfare or Planetary Conquest.
• Active players characters in this case means any player characters that have logged in during event times and play at least 10 battles.
• Active skill boosters will grant bonus skill points earned in this event — Currently ‘Omega Boosters’ are available in the market for 5000 AUR. Omegas grant 100% extra skill point rewards at the end of the battle instead of the 50% of the regular boosters. Boosters affect this reward so if you have a regular booster you will get 1,500,000 SP provided all 1 million clones are killed and 2,000,000 if you’re using Omegas. The total amount of possible SP for this event is 2, 380,000 achieved by hitting the weekly SP cap.
• Have a character that has an active skill booster installed on the first day of the event i.e. after downtime on March 14 in order to qualify for the bonus — CCP will conduct a few checks for those with boosters on Friday for a short while after downtime but to be safe it’s suggested to pop them before down time.
• The length of the booster does not affect the amount of skill point bonus applied i.e. as long as you have an active skill booster of any type installed on your character after downtime on March 14, your character will receive the full bonus from the skill booster for this event.
Now is a really good time to jump back into the game because even if you get owned, you’re helping the greater good. I know I’ll be getting my backside handed to me but with 5 new dropsuits and fully revamped suit and role bonuses just around the corner, the reward is worth it. Also, stock up on a few Omega boosters for future double and triple SP events because earning 570,000 is nice, but 1,140,000 is nicer.
While on the topic of skill points, CCP announced today that the Dropsuit Command skill tree will be getting refunded with all points invested going back into your unallocated pool. If you settled for another suit because the racial variation you wanted wasn’t in game, then now’s the chance to play in that Minmatar heavy frame or the Amarr light frame. Uprising 1.8 will deploy March 25, 2014.
Are you looking to jump back into DUST 514? Let us know in the comments section below. Stay tuned for a look at the new suits coming to DUST 514 later this month.
Alex Locher is PSU’s Community Manager, resident DUST 514 nerd and CEO of PSU’s corporation; PSU GHOST SYNDICATE. Known in-game as THE GREY CARDINAL and COVERT SUBTERFUGE, you can find him at the in-game DUST channel ‘PSU GHOST’, in the PSU forums and on Twitter.