Recent Awards and Merits

Elimination Competition

Your team Mountain Men came in 1st place after your 707 attacks in the Elimination competition. You have been credited with 10 tokens. Thank you for participating. 2016/09/25 2:00:05 PM

The elimination competition was a great experience. I made it to the first page of my team and got several merits in the process.

I started the competition leaving people on the street to gain some points for my team. I quickly leveled up from 74 to 75 and got an Honor: The Beautiful City and a Medal: Level Seventy Five. After that I went to placing bounties and collecting them. I started with around 420 collected so after 80 place+collects, I earned the final bounty Medal: The Fett. I've already complained about how I don't receive many Defends naturally. I paid for about 14 during the competition to push me up to 1,000 and earn the Honor: 007.

Once the competition ended, I received the Honor I never received during the former World War competition, Supremacy. Over the years I had already obtained Mission Accomplished and Purple Heart. Additionally I earned a new Honor: Domination for first place. I'm so proud. After that I was able to spend 4 of my 10 Tokens on Retro and Futurity for 6.

All together I earned 8 merits from and during the Elimination Competition!

Type	Name	Condition
Honor	The Beautiful City	Reach level 75 (Rare)
Medal 15	Level Seventy Five	Reach level 75
Medal 3*	The Fett	Collect 500 bounties
Honor	007	Achieve 1,000 attacks and 1,000 defends (Rare)
Honor	Domination	Finish the Elimination competition with your team in 1st place (Extraordinary)
Honor	Supremacy	Finish the Elimination competition within the top 5% of attacking players in your team (Limited)
Honor	Futurity	Purchased from the Token Shop (Limited)
Honor	Retro	Purchased from the Token Shop (Uncommon)

After that

AFTER the competition I hit the Daily Dime lottery for an Honor: Lucky Break. Ched also fixed something about Ranks and I reached Heroic but I don't have the slightest clue what triggered it. To finish the month, I finally earned the Attention Seeker Medal which cost who knows how many millions of dollars and how many months of maintaining a medical cooldown.

I spent October working in a Sweet Shop hoarding job points not for cans but for happy. As I neared the end of days at the sweet shop I started stacking energy. The job points and the energy stacking earned me two Honors: Energetic and Estatic.

Honor	Lucky Break	Win one of the lotteries (Rare)
Medal 22	Heroic	Reach the rank of "Heroic"
Medal 3*	Attention Seeker	Use 25,000 medical items
Honor	Energetic	Achieve the maximum of 1,000 energy (Uncommon)
Honor	Ecstatic	Achieve the maximum of 99,999 happiness (Extraordinary)

What's next?

I spent a lot of time calculating some methods for training gym stats. I have to make so much money and throw so much energy into stats. I also have to burn so much energy on other things such as Revives, Dump Searched, and attacks. Earning 100,000 Respect is going to require so many attacks. Enough to safely put me over 10,000 won and likely enough to get me past 10,000 critical hits.

Running Away will cost a nice chunk of energy. If I get the Book to run away 100% of the time I can get to 1,000 in that month and probably make a bunch of money if I can find the right buyer. Right now I'm paying a Xanax for each successful runaway and I found someone with the book, but they seem to not be going all out on me so I imagine someone else is paying 1 million per runaway and I'm only getting them occasionally for when they want Xanax.

I'll never run out of crime medals to earn. I am sad that there is no safe Drug crime to do. I thought one of my faction mates who has a 10 year old account was about to finish all non-drug merits, but then I saw he still had 15,000 Thefts left to complete before that was over. If I had a time machine, or a redo, I wouldn't have quit torn and would have grinded out the 10,000 drug crimes. I might have even OD on Cannabis. My stats would also be fiercely improved. Maybe. I also would have finished the old Networth merits. I now need to maintain a networth of 100 BILLION and I can't even make the jump from 7.5 to 8. Pretend this text is thousands of sad faces.

Buying Losses and Runaways

Today I'm going to look at Merits you can earn from receiving attacks rather than initiating.

Defends

Below is a table listing all the Medals you can earn from successfully defending attacks. The cost column assumes you pay people to attack you and lose at a cost of $300,000 per loss and lists how many $Millions you will have to spend.

Defend Merits
Name	Defends	Cost	Notes
Bouncer	50	$15
Self Defense	50	$15	Honor Bar
Brick Wall	250	$75
Turtle	500	$150
007	1000	$300	Honor, 1k attacks won
Solid as a Rock	2,500	$750
Fortress	10,000	$3,000

If you want to buy all the defend merits, it will cost you $3,000,000,000 (3 billion). That's a lot to pay for. You're better off being strong and getting attacked naturally and not losing.

However, as a level 75 player, I only get attacked by strong people who have no problem beating me and therefore I collect almost no defends naturally. I just paid my way to the 007 Honor bar. Without any Defends acquired naturally, I'll have to buy another 1,500 Defends for the next merit and 9,000 for the final merit. This is looking at $450m and $2.7B for the respective Defend medals.

I need people to attack me and lose. I need to get wayyyy stronger so that I don't have to buy all these Defends. If only I could take advantage of getting Bountied and receiving defends. Unfortunately for that I think I'm likely to be focusing on Dexterity for the foreseeable future. It might help with Stalemates, which I don't need because I've already received my 100 for the Honor. I don't know what to do about getting more Defends other than joining Faction Territory wars and hoping someone attacks me unsuccessfully but that stops me traveling which is my main source of safety and income.

Runaways

If you run away from enough foes or have them run away from you you can get Medals. These are intended to be rewards for the situation where someone starts a fight with you, realizes they can't win, and try to escape rather than eat a loss and all their Health. In practice, these can be purchased from players, farmed easily with a friend with proper stats or earned in the early levels.

Below is a table for the Medals related to Runaways. There are no Honors.

Runaway Medals
#	You Run	They Run
50	Close Escape	Ego Smashing
250	Blind Judgement	Underestimated
1,000	Overzealous	Run Forest Run

To increase chances at Runaways, the Runner wants higher Dexterity than the target's Speed. Other things that can help include:

• Education for passive Dexterity (up to +19%)
• Spending Merits on Dexterity (+3% each level)
• Vicodin, +25% all stats or Target being on Xanax (-35% all stats)
• Temp Items: Smoke Grenades and Flash Bangs to reduce enemy Speed
• 10* Car Dealership Perk: +95% chance to Run away
• The Book: Running Away From Trouble (100% Run Away Chance, 31 days)

Book items are a relatively recent addition to Torn items. Books last for a month and you can only have one book active at a time. They can cost anywhere between 1000-2000 mission credits which means a lot of energy spent to earn them. However, a month is enough time to grind out all 1000 runaways especially if you eat Xanax for energy or use point Refills. Otherwise, Runaways will have a chance to fail and can cost additional attempts.

Here are some obstacles that can make Running away more challenging:

• Enemy's Education for passive Speed (up to +13%)
• Enemy spending Merits on Speed (+3% each level)
• Enemy on Vicodin or you on Xanax
• Enemy using Temp Item: Pepper Spray or Tear Gas to reduce your Dexterity
• Enemy having Health and Fitness Bachelor Perk: -50% Enemy Chance to Run away

I was fortunate when I worked on the 50 and 250 Medals for both types. I had a partner. Our stats were compatible: our Dexterity exceeded each other's Speed. We traded Runaways until we both got 250 each and matched attacks. I failed a little more often because they had the Health and Fitness Bachelor, but it was OK as I didn't mind spending a bit on Smoke Grenades. We also coordinated to have the Target on Xanax and the runner off Xanax.

As it stands now, I need just over 700 more enemies to run away from me. I am willing to pay 1 Xanax per Runaway. 720 Xanax to give away will cost me about $600m worth of Xanax. I'm not pursuing this too aggressively so I won't burn out of money right away.

I also need to do 720 Runaways myself. Assuming I succeed 100% of the time, I'm only going to have to spend 18,000 Energy. If luck is a little worse and I only succeed 80% of my attempts, it'll cost more like 22,500 Energy. I want to talk about opportunity cost right now. The table below shows just how many stat's I'll miss out on at different gyms while working on a single Merit:

Gym	George's	Frontline	8* Single
E/Train	10	25	50
Gain/Train	25,200	64,700	138,000
18kE Trains	1,800	720	360
Stat Gain (M)	45.36	46.584	49.68

I was going to calculate how many stats I will miss out on with a less than 100% success rate at Runaways, but I can already tell that this single Merit is NOT worth it. I'm still going to work towards it. Not actively. It's not worth it. But I want it.

Perspective on Runaways

Let's pretend for a second I have no merits spent on Strength. If I spend 1 merit on Strength, I will gain 3% Strength. The break-even Strength stat for this depends on which gym I train Strength at. If it's George's, I need 3% of my stat to be 45m, or a total of 1.5 Billion.

To make it even worse, imagine I have 9/10 merits spent on Strength. I have 9 merits on hand, and this Run Away merit will be the 10th and final merit to be allocated to Strength. This single merit is now worth 1/10th of 3%, or 0.3% my stat in Strength. The new break even point is going to be 15 Billion Strength. How do I get to 15B Strength? Not with training. Energy is near worthless at this point. To simplify things, I'm going to pretend I can't bargain and I buy all my Dumbell Stat Enhancers from Nikeh Sports for $450 million each.

To figure out how many Stat Enhancers I need, I must solve for x: 1.5B * 1.01^x = 15 B
Without showing logarithms, I can say that x=231.4 rounded to 231 because I'll probably train past exactly 1.5B. 231 Dumbells purchased from Nikeh will cost $103.95 Billion. Assuming I can afford all that, Stat Enhancer's still have a cool down of 6 hours limiting their use to 4 per day. In other words, I will have to eat 4 Dumbbells daily for 57.75 days. At this stage of the game I am so far beyond caring about 18,000 Energy. I think.

That's All Folks!

I hope this information was helpful. Feel free to comment with additions or suggestions. Do you like my speculation? Did I make a mistake? Are there any topics in Torn you're interested in or would like to read about? Let me know!