How to earn experience in Call of Duty Black Ops

How to earn experience

The first thing that you should understand about leveling in black ops is how you earn experience. When you enter a game of Black Ops you are rewarded for the tasks you complete in game. Capturing objectives, killing enemies, assisting teammates, and calling in killstreaks are all examples of in game accomplishments that you can do to earn experience. But aside from the obvious ways of earning experience there are also several side challenges, contracts, and bonuses that can help you on your way.

Match Bonuses

Match bonus XP is exerience earned when you complete an entire match. If you leave during a game you forfeit this match bonus (which is a poor quit penalty to say the least). Your match bonus is determined by your current level, the length of the match and also if you win, lose or tie the match. Your match bonus is multiplied by 1 for a win, 0.5 for a loss, and 0.75 for a tie.

In other words, winning is very important to leveling up quickly, which brings me to my first suggestion. Always play with a team. Your team doesn’t have to be full of MLG caliber players. You just have to have share common goal of going after the objective and playing smart in order to win most of your games. If you already have a group of people that you play with that’s great. If you don’t, I recommend getting involved on some gaming forums or tryout for a clan to get some friends online. You can even add players to your console friends list directly from your recent players. If you are playing the game and get matched up with some good players who you enjoyed playing with send them a message and try to start up a party together. Some of the people I currently play with the most are just players I got matched up with randomly online and really enjoyed playing with.

Challenges

COD challenges are specific tasks that you need to complete in order to earn a set amount of experience. There are two basic types of challenges in Black Ops. Static challenges and Progressive challenges.

Static challenges are challenges that you only need to complete once and you will earn the experience for that entire prestige. For example did you know that you will earn 5000 XP just for earning a bankshot medal (bounce a tomahawk off a surface for a kill)?

Progressive challenges on the other hand are challenges that you complete over time, such as the marksman gun challenge. The marksman gun challenge is a challenge for every gun in the game that earns you experience as you get kills with a particular weapon. There are different levels of this challenge which earn you more XP for every level completed.

All challenges reset when you prestige except the lifetime challenges. Lifetime challenges are generic challenges that you work on when playing any mode in multiplayer and do not reset when you prestige.

Contracts

Contracts are in game bounties which you purchase with cod points and reward you with additional cod points and experience. Contracts are determined by Treyarch and switched every 24 hours to allow more variety on the types of challenges you can complete.

I was surprised to find out how many players don’t actually purchase contracts. I guess they don’t think that completing those challenges will earn them very much experience or help them in their leveling, however I am at prestige 13 and have earned over 700,000 XP on contracts alone, more than half of one prestige all together.

Always try to buy contracts that co-operate with each other. For example get 50 kills with an SMG + Capture 3 flags in CTF. Create an SMG runner class and go play some CTF. Or maybe there is a stab 2 people in the back with ninja contract as well as a get 75 kills with the famas contract. Equip ghost & ninja and a silenced famas and go to work on the other team.

Finally, don’t buy contracts that are going to cause you to do poorly in a game. There might be a 1000 XP contract for getting 50 kills while using the ACOG and Extended Mags on a gun but if you suck while using a poor class setup you are going to end up losing more than 1000 XP from missed kills and frustrating games/losses.