Was just thinking it would be neat if we had an online competitive ladder league similar to the ones found in ARPG titles like Diablo and Path of Exile which are more like PvE ranking systems rather than PvP.
Rankings would be determined by your total wealth, although to make it more meaningful, financial dynamics would need to be tuned to be much less...gratuitous.. than they currently are. It should be more challanging to progress through the game, and impossible to reach the point where you can stomp everything and ez-grind as much net profit as you want. It should be a competition of skill to make it as far as you can go. It should also be a mandatory Ironman Mode, to prevent people from save-scumming their way to victory. Without Ironman (or hardcore as its commonly called in other games), save-scumming becomes a competitive obligation it just turns into a game of who has the most time to waste.
I would propose two leagues, Casual and Pro, and you can only compete in one. Top rankers of casual can only play Pro once the next season starts. Pro players above a certain rank can no longer play Casual. That's all to prevent sandbagging; more skilled players playing in lower skilled competitions for the purpose of easy wins.
This would all be done in a seperate game option than campaign, so that players aren't forced to compete in a game balanced for a more challanging playstyle.
Ranking boards would include some details, but not enough to spill the beans on a players specific strategy and tactics. Ingenuity should be rewarded, rather than allowing everyone to just copy someone elses more successful strategies (without their permission). Some details that others could see in the ranking ladder:
-Current fleet size (in deployment points)
-Total cost of ships and equipment lost in combat
-General arrayment of skills. ie: how many you have in each of the 4 trees.
-Maybe: Favorite ship piloted. ie: most time spent piloted.
-Maybe: Ranking of favored ships to deploy; basically just gives each ship type a +1 each time you deploy it, and displays it in a top10 list, for example, but hides the specific number of times deployed.
And maybe when the ladder details are saved, it also uploads other stats that Alex or whoever can peruse to get information to help with balancing (or discover cheating).
I think this would have a lot of benefits for everyone.
-Players would get to experience some competitive multiplayer, without the huge hassle of supporting simultaneous multiplayer, massive multiplayer, or anything of the sort. (presumably, Starsector would just create a log of certain details, and when the player saves and exits, the log gets uploaded to a server and the server log linked to the player's account is saved. This would also encourage people to properly buy the game, so they can compete in the ladder).
-Alex would get details to help with the multiple areas of game balance.
-Players could get more solid details on what is or is not doable in the game by players with higher scores than them, encouraging and motivating them to improve themselves. (Players who don't want to compete or witness how their casual skills stack up against gaming fanatics can just ignore the Ladder game option).
-Ladder seasons would give players a sense of activity and accomplishment not otherwise seen in the game.
-Alex can test new and whacky ideas by creating rules or introducing new stuff to each season, and players will get to have fun with that.
This wouldn't necessarily have to be done by Alex. I'm sure this could be modded into the game. You'd just have to manually send or use a third party program to send your log to a server. It would have to check for mods installed and other things to ensure that everything is koshur (details added to log).
It's a fair bit of a work, but it'd be a neat addition to the community. It'd give streamers something great to record, too.
As far as adding mods to the ladder, I think that would be a very difficult endeavor because it would require the cooperation of all mod devs to help balance keep their mods updated. Balance in particular would be a very big issue. Not to mention the danger of accidental cross-mod synergies, even mods that have made it into the main AI Tournament competitions would be outrageously unbalanced for the scope of this ladder competition. After careful considering, maybe one or two factions mods could be playable. If it could be done, however, adding factions but not allowing them to be playable (or their ships/equipment usable. ie:vendor trash) would be doable. Nexelerin would be fun. We'd just need to figure out how to accurately calculate a players wealth, seperate from their faction's but including the value of the cash they invest or investment lost.
Anyway, just some ideas I had to help lay the foundation (if my suggestion will ever fly). However it may end up, it'd be neat to see a well done, fair and challenging ladder system.
