This morning, 35 Steam players, myself included, started up Concord and decided to play a few games of Rivalry, a competitive mode in Concord that dishes out the most XP available. After waiting for five minutes (I’m queuing with PS players, too), I finally got into a match, if you can call it that.
Within a couple of seconds, the first round was over as the enemy team flung themselves into the sea just below the spawn point, killing them instantly. No, this isn’t some weird glitch, or just a group of particularly sad players. Before Sony takes Concord offline in a couple of days, players are trying to get as much XP as possible, and the best way to do this is by killing themselves in Rivalry.
The enemy team continued to off themselves for each of the four rounds, meaning my team won with no elims, no damage, and no healing done at all. By the end of it, I got 15,000 XP for winning and managed to level up after just one game. It’s actually a pretty smart idea. You get tons of XP and have to spend no more than a couple of minutes in-game—the queue times are actually longer than the matches.
But not all my matches were as clean-cut as my first one. Instead of jumping off a nearby cliff, the enemy team in the second Rivalry match I played chose death by firing squad. At first, I thought we were going to play an actual game, so we secured the objective, but after waiting for a couple of minutes, everyone in my team realised that no one was coming for us. So we went to look for the enemy, and sure enough, they were standing still in their spawn point, where we quickly finished them off. In the subsequent rounds, my teammates and I ran straight to the enemy spawn to kill them all instead of messing around with the objective.
Not everyone has given up, though. I did have a couple of games in which at least a few people actually tried to take things seriously. While some stayed still and others ran to the nearest map edge, one or two competitors put up a good fight, but even still, matches were over just as quickly as they began.
In one Rivalry match in which my entire team went AFK, I did try to fight back, but I only managed to take out a maximum of two people per round, which obviously wasn’t enough to secure the win. I also got the vibe from my fellow teammates that I was drawing things out too long and obstructing their get-rich-quick hack. Even still, a loss granted me another 15,000 XP, and within five games, I managed to climb three levels.
But not everyone has been successful with this new strategy. “I’ve been doing this shit for an hour and only went from Level 44 to 45, I am NOT getting this Platinum, bro,” one player says on Twitter. Apart from just trying to make the most of Concord in its last few days, some players are trying to rapidly level up in an attempt to platinum the game.
Leveling your account to 100 means you’ve essentially completed the game, and PS players will get a platinum trophy for all their hard work. Right now, it’s an ultra-rare trophy, which just 0.1% of players have managed to earn. The trophy name is also “Living Legend,” which some have pointed out as being quite fitting: “Ironic how this is the most fitting trophy name for the one person in the world who Platinum’d Concord,” one player says on Twitter.
But it’s not all about the platinum trophy. Another good reason to level up your account is to get all the free cosmetics and items that come with it. Concord is full of really cool customisable options. Some of the hero skins, like the Freegunner outfits, look great. There are weapon charms and skins, but my favourite customisable item is probably the business card.
This is like your run-of-the-mill name card, but instead of getting to pick different backgrounds, you can completely change it up. There are different icons, backgrounds, and side bars, which means you can make a card that looks unique. Then you also get to pick a motto like “Bad for you, good for business” or “Tighten those buns, let’s get it done” as well as deciding what two stats you want to display alongside it on the card. I currently have my elims and damage dealt, but you can put how many 6+ kill streaks you’ve had, headshots, and much more.
Right now, you can get all of these custom items for free—they all just unlock with playtime. But if Concord does manage to make a comeback, there’s a decent chance it’ll do so by becoming a free-to-play game, which also means these customisable items may well be locked behind a paywall.
So, if you have a few hours free and want to join in the last-ditch effort to climb to level 100, grab some cool skins, or just have a fun time watching players hurl themselves off the side of the map, then you have a couple more days to do so.