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Elite: Dangerous' first Triple Elite player just won £10,000

Played on average 15 hours a day.

Elite: Dangerous developer Frontier just awarded £10,000 to the first player to reach Triple Elite status.

Now those are some stats.

Back in December 2014 Frontier announced the Race to Elite competition to see who would reach the endgame status in each of Elite: Dangerous' three disciplines: combat, trading and exploration.

£1000 would be given to the winner of each discipline. But the big money - £10,000 - was in the Triple Elite category, to be awarded to the first player to reach Elite status in all three disciplines.

Now, three months after Elite: Dangerous went on sale proper, Frontier boss David Braben has announced the winners.

Commander Onepercent achieved Triple Elite status before any other Elite: Dangerous player and now £10,000 is on its way to him. He played for a whopping 1029 hours from 18th December 2014 to 24th February 2015, when he posted screenshots of his achievement on the Frontier forum.

That's an average of just under 15 hours a day.

CMDR Onepercent visited 10,342 unique star systems and travelled 180,688 light years as part of the exploration discipline, scored 9032 kills as part of the combat discipline, and traded 835,410 tonnes of goods for the trading discipline (2000 tonnes were traded on the black market, but we won't hold that against him).

Here's a basic explanation of his approach, according to a post from CMDR Onepercent on the Frontier forum:

And here's some more from CMDR Onepercent, this time on how he was able to play so much:

CMDR Onepercent lives in Australia, which seems to have helped. Here's a post by the star commander on the Frontier forum in response to another user who jokingly wondered whether he had a vitamin D deficiency following his exploits:

CMDR Lordkee took home £1000 for winning the trade prize, CMDR Fromtonrogue won the combat prize, and the wonderfully-named CMDR Tequila won the exploration prize.

Cover image for YouTube videoRace To Elite Winners Announcement