Patch 0.8.3.0 (Saturday 27 February 2021)
Greetings everybody ! This is a major new patch introducing the new player progression mechanics, a new team screen including stats with a new leaderboard, and battle reports. A lot of the changes are experimental and will need further refining/tuning, so as usual feedback is welcome.
We've also shifted the economy to work passively (credits get distributed regularly by the AI commander, instead of having to grind them actively in game) which should improve the strategical depth to the game and give more importance to attacking or protecting haulers.
We're introducing the concept of research & development, under the form of science points that get researched at military facilities, finally giving them a strategical purpose. As your team accumulates research points, it unlocks new tech levels which unlock weapons and ship upgrades.
For the individual player progression, we introduced the concept experience points (XP) which are used to get promoted to a higher your military rank, also unlocking certain weapons and upgrades. XP and rank only ever goes up and can never be lost, and unlike credits, is persistent accross matches. Finally, we've introduced the concept of team rating (TR) which measures your individual performance and how much you're contributing to your faction's war efforts. You can earn or lose rating points after succeeding or failing a battle/mission, and the calculation is similar to a chess ELO-like system, taking into account the team ratings and participation of your opponents. At the moment, we've decided against locking ships, weapons or upgrades to your rating, as it'd prevent players with a lower skill level to access some of the content. We're currently thinking of tying the rating to special cosmetics and maybe some special social roles, like the team commander, but if you have more ideas do not hesitate to let us know. Team rating is also persistent accross matches.
Next patch we'll continue on iterating/adjusting the new progression mechanics, while doing a new pass over the weapons systems, rebalancing them, and finally introducing sub-systems targetting.
Progression system
- Implemented match progression: military rank, xp and team rating
- You now get XP instead of credits for killing enemy ships, and for participating to battles/missions
- Once XP reaches a threshold it will level-up your military rank. There are 10 ranks total at the moment, with increasing XP thresholds
- XP only ever goes up, you cannot lose XP even if you fail at missions or get killed
- Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by military rank. It is still possible to edit the loadouts, but you won't be able to spawn them without meeting their requirements
- Team rating (TR) starts at 1500 and utilizes a chess ELO-like system, which measures your skill level and how you win or lose with your faction
- You earn or lose TR points based on your achievements and statistics in a battle/mission, once a battle report pops up
- Your TR is compared against the enemy team's, in a complex formula that includes the average opponent's rating points and the initial victory odds
- So if you were favored to win and actually won, you'll gain less points than winning when you were favored to lose, and vice-versa in case of defeat
- TR gains or losses are weighted by your participation points, which measure the amounts of activity (no matter if you performance well or bad) during the mission
- Implemented team tech level and R&D which generate 'science points' at military facilities, which level up the team's tech level automatically
- There is no individual player tech level, the tech level is shared by all members of the team
- Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by team's tech level like the military rank
- Tech level starts at 1 at the match's start and goes up to 5 after a few hours, assuming military facilities haven't been destroyed
- XP, military rank and team rating are persistent accross matches (but not servers)
- The tech level is not persistent and will reset after the match ends
Team statistics screen
- Revamped the team menu tab, now called 'Stats', to show the player leaderboard and the current team's / match statistics
- There is now a leaderboard panel at the center which shows players either online or offline, irrespective of their current team (all mixed up)
- Each entry in the leaderboard shows the player's rating rank (sorted by descending rating score), military rank/player name, kills/assists/death match stats, and time online (if the player is currently offline, it'll show the last time this player connected on this server)
- There are filter options to show all players (from the past 30 days), players that participated in the current match, or players currently online only
- The leaderboard should now properly show players logging in/out (previously: some caching bugs sometimes caused some players to be invisible to new players)
- Each team now has a dedicated panel showing various stats, such as match score, number of players per team, average team rating, credits income/amounts, science research points/tech level and ships losses/amounts. There's also an asset panel showing the amount of ships and bases for that team currently owned (or detected, if belonging to the enemy) in game
- Implemented match statistics, which are sent to the client when he joins a server, then gets updated every minute. They are displayed as a graph at the bottom of the team panel. Different statistics/graphs can be toggled on or off (note: this still needs a polish pass, changing colors if there are many graphs, showing the axis names/range etc..)
Battle reports
- Implemented battle/mission reports that pop up a statistic screen at the end of a battle
- The battle report automatically opens up only when you enter the in-game menus (default key: TAB)
- The report shows rating changes (gain or loss), participation ratio, mission score and XP gained
- Your mission score is calculated from your statistics during the mission: how many ships you killed, how you died, how much damage you made to enemy ships or structures, or how much you assisted your team like via repairs/resupplies
- The center of the panel cycles every 10 seconds between 2 tabs: the first one shows the podium for the top 3 players and their mission scores. The second one shows the top 8 players, you included, with the score ranking and various statistics
- The bottom of the panel also shows a bunch of toggle-able graphs showing your statistics over the battle/mission duration. If you did not participate during some time, some gaps in the graphs might appear
- When you close ('Dismiss') the report, the leaderboard will temporarily open to show your change of rating before/after the mission or battle
- Note that closed reports currently are not stored and cannot be re-opened later on, so if you're interested in your stats, do not close the panel too quickly
Economy
- Rebalanced the economy towards a more passive credits income system
- Credits still get redistributed to players over time, every minute. Target is 25 credits/minute per player
- Credits still get generated at space stations after a hauler travelled there from a factory
- Credits cannot be earned from killing normal ships or destroying base structures anymore
- Credits can still be earned 'actively' by targetting ships with bounties placed on by your team commander
- Tweaked haulers income: each hauler now has a much higer resource load (x2 to x3 compared to before)
Weapons
- Fixed an issue that caused slight irregular fire frequencies when firing a weapon
- Burst firing will no longer resume at previous burst count after being interrupted. A new burst will properly start after some short cooldown
- Fixed the torpedo launcher that had a mass of zero. It now has a mass of 2 tons
Mouse cursor sensitivity
Note: it is possible that the sensitivity settings have changed since the previous versions if you've customized them. If so, you might need to re-check and adapt your settings again
- Fixed sensitivity settings: mouse cursor now takes into account windows settings (mouse speed, window DPI)
- Made coherent the range of sensitivity sliders in the options men
- Changing a sensitivity slider is now applied instantly instead of having to apply & close the options menu
New control scheme
- Added a new control scheme: 'auto-recentering'
- It works like in other space games: you still have a cursor whose relative position on screen controls where and how fast you turn, but this cursor is hidden by default (there is an option to make it visible)
- This cursor automatically moves back towards the screen center after a delay where you don't move it. This delay can be changed with a slider in the options menu
- The speed at which the cursor moves back can also be changed through a slider in the options menu
- This control scehem should feel more natural than the 'direct mode' for the mouse, like you're in better control of the orientation of your ship, so mouse users that do not like the default virtual cursor control scheme and do not find the direct mode to work well, could give this one a try
General bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed HDR/IBL generation bug that made the whole screen turn white for a long time in certain conditions
- Fixed server browser ping in the 100-200 ms range being displayed in red/bad instead of yellow/average
- Fixed a rare bug with credits initially showing as zero on the client upon joining a match, despite the player having more than zero credits on the server
- Players can now change their call sign/name in game (previously, the change was only applied on joining a server)
- Fixed drop shadows not appearing correctly below some icons (ex.: team icons at the top of the menu tab had a black square background instead of a drop shadow)
- Fixed a UI bug that could cause a crash if a panel was being refreshed/rebuilt while scrolling its content