Rating Acquired - Development Log #392

This week's devlog concludes the series about the upcoming rating changes.

Michi (molp)

I was able to finish the implementation of the rating update this week. If you missed the last few devlogs, it started with Fabian's entry, about the game design reasoning behind it. I followed up with two technical devlogs, one about removing the old sub-scores and one where I talk about how conditions are valuated.

After finishing the last missing backend parts, I went onto updating the user interface. Up until now, if one wanted to their own rating, they had to use the CO <own company code> command to see it. Usually that command was opened by clicking the company name in the sidebar. I decided to add the rating to the sidebar directly, making it easier to find.

Up until now the CO command had two lines that displayed the rating information. One was the overall rating and the other a table with all sub-scores. I removed the sub-score part entirely. During development, we received feedback that it might be interesting for other players to see on what the rating is based, to make it possible to distinguish between a fresh company that might have acquired a certain rating only recently and an older company. We are now showing on how many contracts a rating is based and how far the first of these contracts lies back in time:

We also received feedback that it is important for some players to see how active a player is, in order to judge how fast they will reply or fulfill contract conditions. Although we removed the activity sub-score, we still have that activity data and will now display a user's activity in the USR command in the form of active days per week. The value is based on a rolling 21-day average:

All these changes will go live with the Liquidity release. If you are a star (or above) supporter, you can already try these changes on our test server.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

With Michi still being hard at work implementing the last new features for the Liquidity update, I had some additional time to look into smaller tweaks and balancing updates. For example, by popular request we will increase the CX order size limit and also give HQ production bonuses a bit of a buff.

On top of that, ship parts will see a few changes. A few experiments with the currently available setups revealed that too many, and especially higher-tier ships are limited by their maximum g factor. Therefore, the high-g seats will receive significant buffs. Additionally, high-tier STL engines were usually not worth the extra fuel they use, so they will see reduced fuel flow rates. With a similar reasoning, the expensive high- and hyper-power reactors will now be the FTL engines with the highest charge speed. Also, shields aren't seeing a lot of use since they not only need to be added when building a ship, but also repaired continuously. Hence, heat and whipple shields will receive a significant increase to their damage reduction values. Finally, as a sort of general comment, we're aware that the starter ships are actually very good right now and make us start of from a pretty high baseline, which can make balancing the higher tiers properly a bit awkward in certain aspects. While we'll not take shipping potential away from existing players or disadvantage new starters in this universe, it's something that's certainly on our list to look into again for the next one.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!