published on February 23, 2026 in devlog
Michi talks about the ongoing increase in support work and about the faction influence feature.
Michi (molp)
Unfortunately, the support work I talked about in last week's devlog #518 didn't get much less, but there's at least light at the end of the tunnel. The email situation with Microsoft is not yet resolved. We are waiting for their feedback at the moment. We added a note to the sign-up form, saying to contact us when setting up an account with a Microsoft-related email address. We are still hoping that the block will be removed soon.
The wave of automatic company creations has ebbed down a bit. We still had to remove quite a few accounts, but it was less than last week. If you still see suspicious accounts, please let us know.
The performance update to the leaderboards was successful, but is currently negated by another performance issue with a non-/slow-responding company that I have yet to investigate fully. During the investigation I found something that suspiciously looks like someone trying to snatch a plot on a full planet by trying over and over again until they hit that brief moment where a plot gets free due to a company liquidation. I have yet to confirm the exact details, but given that I saw 10,000+ tries, I can only assume this was automated, which is, of course, not permitted by our ToS.
Besides all that support and performance work, I have been able to start working on the faction influence feature mentioned in devlog #517. As you might know, I sometimes start with the UI part of a new feature. However, given that the goal right now is to evaluate the faction influence generation for another round of balancing and adjustments of the game design document, there won't be much to see for a while. So naturally, I started with the backend work first. I still want to talk about this work in the devlogs, so I'll try my best to shed some light on what we're building:
Right now I am implementing faction influence pools. They are basically a (technical) way to accumulate faction influence points. Planets, systems and the factions themselves will have one. In the end they all collect faction influence points from various sources, but they slightly differ in their behavior. I'll go into the details once I am implementing these behaviors, but here is an overview: The planets' pools collect the faction influence from the players and (more or less) immediately transfer them into the system pool. The systems keep their influence and accumulate it, as they need the influence points to be above a certain threshold for the system to continue to be part of a given faction. At the end of an influence period the influence points up to the threshold are removed, and the rest of the points are being transferred into the respective faction pool. The faction can then use the points to perform motion-like actions. Influence periods are 14 days long and synchronized between all planets, systems and factions.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!