A few of my friends have come to me complaining that they have been struggling to even get 50 dog tags during this comp. This was baffling to me, because in my first year with barely 10k in total stats I literally had so many excess tags I was able to acquire the merits, 10 tokens, and help my spouse at the time get his 50/250 dog tag merit (I forget which) by giving him the tags I found to complete his collection. I also egged forums users on to steal as many of my tags as they could before the competition was over, and still ended up in the 90th percentile.

There's an explanation as to why this works and other tips and tricks for optimizing successful tag acquisition for all those curious at the bottom of this thread post. The TL;DR is a systematic approach is largely ineffective after the first week, and a random approach is better.

You can apply this strategy to advanced search as well if you want more efficiency in customizing your results, but I used the general user list because the advanced search url was too big, and not everyone has advanced search.

So, without further ado, the strategy I’ve used to get tags!

• Go to the user search bar at the top of the Torn page and simply hit enter. This will take you to the complete user list in alphabetical order. Or you can just click here and bookmark the link for easy access.

• Click a random page. You will notice after doing this that there is a number at the end of the url in your browser.

 

• At this point you can change the number at the end of the user list url to any random 5-6 digit number you wish, and it’ll take you to a page within the massive archives where you’ll find your targets (you might have to hit enter twice after typing the number at the end for the new page to load). Notice in the example shown below, entering 521455 in the url takes you to page 20,859 in the user archives.

 

You can then sift through the users on that page and jump to other pages once you’re satisfied you’ve hit all the people you wanted on the current page. Rinse, repeat, until you have acquired your Dog Tags competition goals!

 

As promised, here is the explanation as to why this works, as well as why other things you may have tried have failed. Also included are tips and tricks to optimize this guide to accomplish your goals.

First off, hitting active users is usually a waste of time and energy. Everyone else is looking to get active users’ tags as well, even though there’s a 75% (source: made up) chance they’re not even participating, and these hapless players probably have been attacked 2-3 times within the first couple days of the competition and lost their tag anyway. You can find targets who are participating in the competition and that usually yields positive results, but you can save yourself the trouble of troubleshooting a target list by simply tapping the seemingly limitless supply of inactives who have also acquired their own personal tag for this competition. They’re not using it anyway, so they definitely wouldn’t mind you taking them off their hands, either.:)

So now that we know who to target, what's the best way to find inactives with their tags still intact? I've seen others take a systematic approach, and trying to take tags from high-level inactives to get their point count up exponentially while they’re simultaneously increasing their tag count, but this approach is pretty fruitless after the first week or so.

There are two things wrong with this strategy - 1) the more systematic your approach, the more likely you are to fall in the footsteps of someone who took a similar approach. It’s better to be as random as possible to minimize the possibility you’re hitting a list of targets already clobbered by another user with the same idea.

And 2) the higher the level, the lower the probability they still have their tag, especially as the competition progresses. You might be successful currently in acquiring tags from higher-level actives and inactives, but a week down the line it'll be a lot more rare for you to find users even level 20 and above who still have their tags on them, due to a whole slue of Tags competitors using the advanced search feature on Torn. You can still use the advanced search engine as was suggested above for lower level players, but definitely try to go to random pages instead of going through the user list if provides you systematically, and try advanced levels at the risk of not getting as many tags.

Also, if your inactive is super old, they might also have some easy cash! So mug away!

Happy hunting!