Tournament Server: Quality of Life Improvements

Greetings, Commanders!

Our first in-depth look at the Tournament Server starts with Quality of Life (QOL) changes.  We want to make PVP competition more intuitive and exciting and the Tournament Server is a step in that direction. Design focus will continue to embrace player choice instead of artificial or grinding difficulty. Without further ado, here are some of the QOL changes coming soon to a galaxy near you!

For an overview of Tournament Server news, make sure you keep an eye on this article!

Bundle of Crates

Mission runners, rejoice!  No longer will crates need to be opened one-by-one.  We are introducing a new feature with the Tournament Server that allows players to open all crates at once.

Daily Challenge Re-Rolls

A fundamental activity in Starborne is completing daily challenges.  These challenges award experience and are one of the only sources of permanent cards in the game.  On one hand, re-rolling dailies is a rewarding experience that can fulfill achievements and net better cards.  On the other, it’s also a core feature to ensure that all players are able to complete their dailies every day.  

The Tournament Server will have a limited number of Commands available to any player each day (specific details coming in a future article).  Considering both the importance of dailies and the scarcity of Commands, all players will receive 2 free daily challenge re-rolls every day.

Increased Building Queue

The community asked, and we listened!  All accounts will have a base build queue of 6 hours.  The Premium Subscription doubles that amount to 12 hours.  This change coincides with our desire to embrace decision making over tedium.  Players will still be able to queue buildings of any length provided they have at least one second of build time available.  

Alliance Assaults

Alliance leaders, rejoice!  The number of available alliance assaults is being increased to 20.  This is to enable alliance leaders to better manage when and where to attack.  Even with only one participant, an Alliance Assault is an easy way to track plans from a bird’s eye view.  We will continually improve Alliance Assaults to make them an even better tool for alliance management.  

Unlocked FOB Hangars

Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) are a core element of galactic warfare.  As such, players are utilizing them to coordinate both assault and defense operations.  The FOB hangars can now be used to both deposit and restock on ships rather than having to make a pit stop at the Alliance Station.  Be wary, though, because ships in the hangar of FOBs can be easily destroyed!

Rally Point

Building and transporting thousands of ships around a large empire can be quite tedious.  Not only do the ships have to be built, but fleets or freighters must be used to move those ships to the desired location.  Ships simply sitting in a hangar are vulnerable and provide little value.  

On one hand, we want to enable players to use ships as fast as they can be built.  On the other, we don’t want to create exploitative scenarios that allow for rapid deployment of ships across the galaxy.  

To address these issues, we have decided to introduce a Rally Point feature.  When adding ships to a ship build queue, there will be an option to deliver the queue directly to your current capital station.  When ships are delivered to the hangar (whether finishing the entire order or manually delivering partial builds), they will be instantly delivered to the capital hangar if that option is selected.  The capital station can only be moved one time; preventing the possibility of teleporting ships at will.    If the capital station is moved or destroyed, any ships already in a queue will not use the Rally Point (even if they are ready to deliver). 

Ideally, players will be able to funnel ships to their capital; which would act as (or be near) the main fleet operating station.  All fleets could then be committed to taking or defending space instead of towards logistics. Also, players that focus heavily on ship production will have an easier time supporting their allies.  

Exporting Spy Reports

One of the pain points that players expressed in Alpha 9 was the difficulty of sharing spy reports with other players.  While we are working on a more permanent solution, we wanted to ensure that players have all of the tools they need for the Tournament Server.  

To that extent, players will be able to copy spy reports to their computer clipboard in text format.  This text can then be pasted into any external source.  Not only does this allow these reports to be shared, but that data can now be aggregated and manipulated in ways that screenshots do not allow.  This is just the first iteration of exporting reports; we will continue to improve this feature after the Tournament Server.  

Combat reports were also requested, but due to time constraints, they will not be available for export in the Tournament Server.  

One. Month. Away!

The Tournament Server launches on Sunday, December 1st, 2019.  Take this time to gather your friends, family and foes to prepare for an epic launch.  We’ll be releasing further details next week on Premium Account Subscriptions and how they interact on the Tournament Server, so be sure to keep an eye out!  Join our Official Starborne Discord Server to stay up to date on all the latest Starborne news and exclusive sneak-peeks on the upcoming building planner changes.

As always, Fly Safe, Commanders!

-Starborne Dev Team