What you're losing is the immediate feedback of a positive shift for a battle well fought and a negative shift for a screw-up. You kinda get them, but accounted for with an average score that moves slowly over a period of time.
True, but that immediacy (in conjunction with RNG) has some serious downsides. If a ship does well in a large battle without getting a good trait, but then gets a bad trait in the next battle due to sub-par performance, it could be pretty frustrating. With the rating system, immediate feedback would be in the form of adjustments to a ships rating (which would be shown in battle reports).
As the mod strives to become more fair overall, we see it also distance itself a bit from the 'fun' ideal of.. "I saw one of my allies take a risk and take out a tough foe, now it's got determined crew and an armor bonus." Or "I decloaked right into a barrage and now my crew thinks the phase coil's busted." Moments of excellence are very hard to quantify by algorithm.
True, and that's a good point that I hadn't considered. The RNG of the current system reflects the fickleness of gossip, but this system wouldn't do that so well. I think the relationship between combat rating and traits would be under-the-hood enough not to completely subvert that impression.
I'd say go for it, but keep the current algorithm on standby in case it doesn't play out.
Oh, for sure. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to keep the current system as a setting.
When it be moved to "Mods"?
An excellent question.
I'll request that it be moved to the Mods subforum (and I'll stop calling it a BETA) once I'm fairly confident that the design goals have been met and that all bugs of any significance have been fixed. Basically, once its core features are "done."
If you do this, please consider some sort of 'decay' of old reputation. Even if it's just an option that takes the old rating and multiplies by 0.9 or 0.95 before factoring in the newest reputation. It would be nice to know that a couple bad battles early isn't going to doom your ship to have negatives forever. Give people a reason to hang on to old craft.
That sounds like it might actually be exactly what I had in mind:
new_persistent_rating = old_persistent_rating * 0.9 + battle_rating * 0.1