Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28686446-20160630100236/@comment-26854521-20160630105548

It's more like the opposite. On the 2nd floor almost all of the Rankers called him a monster,  Lero-Ro, Quant, YHS and even Ren  aknowledged him, without even knowing that he was an Irregular. And even before that he managed to impress everyone by using Black March on the first floor. SIU said it as well. Most of the season 1 crew was not supposed to stick around until much later, but he changed things because he probably felt pressured by the audience as well as Naver, to not make it too violent. Just look at the character cards that were released in the first season. Most of them weren't supposed to be particularly talented and/or special. Maybe the two (or 1.5 rather) Princesses and Koon were supposed to stick around, at least until the Koon Family arc, if that was already planned at that point (which would be my assumption)  and obviously Hwa Ryun and Rachel, and at most a little bit of Rak, but the rest didn't seem like an essential part of the plot. Maybe it was planned to have FUG kill them, at leat some of them, maybe not. It seems a bit inconsequential right now in the plot with FUG kinda leaving Baam to do what he wants after he sort of just left them.

To the Urek part. No, you don't have to be stronger than him to climb faster. Almost all of the tests are against other Regulars. Therefore you only have to be stronger than the other Regulars in the same tests to climb about as fast. I can't imagine that there was any serious competition for Urek, and even if he was about 10 times as weak as we was when he climbed, I don't think that it would have slowed down his progress at all. Maybe he wouldn't have fought Arie Hon, but I don't think Urek is particularly proud of climbing the Tower in 50 years. But to come back to the first part, yeah, it is unusual that almost all of the season 1 people are keeping up with the pace, when for example Leeso barely managed to pass Lero-Ro's test. I personally didn't think that people could climb the Tower that far, by just being in a strong team. I thought that there would be individual as well as team tests, but at this point it seems like there are almost no individual tests. We've seen a little bit of that on the 20th floor, but even then as long as you're somewhat diplomatic you could probably get people to help you pass (first round of the 20th floor test Viole did).

It has been strongly foreshadowed that Baam would at some point be too strong for his 'friends', and climb the Tower without them. SIU did that with Quant in season 1 and not too long ago with Koon again. I'd honestly really like it, if it happened sometime soon. If you think about Ship's team, it seems plausible to assume that they could keep going up for some time longer, if Androssi is carrying them, but it's also possible that things change for her and that she thinks about herself more or that she makes the decision to stay away from Anak for both of their sakes.