This guide intends to explain to you how to optimize your time/experience gain ratio in Gears of War 2’s ranking system legitimately: i.e. no boosting and no glitching.

A Basic Overview:

To go up in rank, you need to complete games and gain experience. The more experience you earn, the higher your rank. The highest points scoring games are the respawning game modes, but the quickest have little or no respawns. This leaves a dilemma of which to pick? Hopefully this guide will help explain which one choice is the best choice for YOU.

The experience gained at the end of every game depends upon three things:

1. The number of points you received in that game in total (not the number of kills, captures etc that you achieved, these do not affect the experience awarded).
2. The game mode you were playing.
3. If you quit the game before. Quitters receive a -1500 exp penalty at the end of their next completed game for every game that they have quit from.
    

The Basic Experience Formula:

Average experience awarded per game = your average points per game for that game mode

This is a list of actual game mode values:

• Warzone- 1
• Execution- 0.95
• Guardian- 0.83
• Submission- 0.47
• Annex- 0.23
• KOTH- 0.28
• Wingman- 1.09
• Horde- N/A atm

Source: [Here]

Annex has changed from 0.26 –> 0.23, Guardian 0.91 –> 0.83, Submission 0.49 –> 0.47 and Execution 0.98 –> 0.95 in updates

From this we can see that Wingman and the game modes previously grouped as ‘Elimination’ (Warzone, Execution, Guardian) are more effective at converting points into experience than the ‘Territories’ (KOTH, Annex, Submission).

It appears that the player is ‘rewarded’ for the lack of/reliant upon others spawning systems in place for the ‘Elimination’ game modes, and ‘penalized’ for the almost unlimited respawning in these other game modes. However, in these ‘Elimination’ game modes, fewer points are usually earned in comparison with ‘Territories’.

EPIC has tried to balance the new experience system so that the experience earned per game is balanced throughout all of the different game modes. Crucially, this theory ignores the average time for these games to finish…

To combat this uses YOUR answer to the Basic Experience Formula, in this formula:

Speed of Experience Gain Formula:

Speed = Average experience awarded per game (answer from Basic Experience Formula)*Game Duration

This is a list of approximate Game Duration values:

• Warzone-1
• Execution-1
• Guardian-0.8
• Submission-0.4
• Annex-0.5
• KOTH-0.5
• Wingman-1.15
• Horde-N/A (as of now)

The higher your answer, the quicker your experience gain from that game mode is. Your answer is in ‘average experience gained per arbitrary of time’, the average duration of a Warzone game is taken as 1 unit.

Using the information you have gained:

What really matters here is how good YOU are. If you have a points per match ratio of over 1000 in the ‘Elimination’ game modes, it is advisable for you to play these more than others in order to increase your rank quicker.

However if your points per match ratio in the ‘Territories’ game modes is more than 8000, it is advisable for you to play these (the 8000 comes from the use of the ‘game mode values’ and an assumption that the average ‘Territories’ game take twice as long as the ‘Elimination’ game modes).

When not in a party and the ability to fix which gametype being played is not available, you have to work out your values for each playlist not just an individual gametype. This may affect which playlist you choose.

I have found that the ‘average’ gears player feels that the Guardian-Submission playlist is their ‘playlist of choice’. Personally, as I do disproportionally well in Execution-Warzone I tend to prefer utilizing this playlist. Those skilled in territorial warfare (i.e. capturing, holding and breaking points) are obviously tended towards the Annex-KOTH playlist as they score well in these game types. Wingman is a safe bet if you have a skilled friend who allows you to win more games than you lose and therefore earn a high number of points per game.

To find your average points awarded per game either:

•  Go to http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/WebStats/default.htm and click ‘Sign in’, then enter your email and password for your gamertag and you can view all of your stats.
• View the leaderboard section of the GOW2 menu
• Press (Y) when in the multiplayer lobby after a game to view your stats for that game mode.

Hopefully you should now be able to figure out which is the quickest way for you to rank up. Any suggestions on how to improve the post are welcome, and I will try to answer any questions.