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The Prosperous Universe team has a development update covering March and April. Work continues on an updated New Player Experience, the faction influence system, and there was a bit of a political scandal.
Faction Influence work focuses on the long term, with three sources of influence generation to collect data on before they implement features in live game. The three sources of generation include workforce satisfaction with varying levels of contribution, government participation, and faction contracts. Each of these has different levels and factors that impact the yield. In April, the team switched on influence transfers, only to bog down the servers until they could stagger the rate and adjust update rates.
The new player experience is getting more than just a coat of polish. The current tutorial has three new improvements, including a new step that highlights the notifications button (NOTS), a reminder to pick up materials from a contract condition, and a clearer, more informative flight tutorial that shows the commodity exchange station code for each starting faction.
Further work will continue, with a post tutorial contract series in development that should help new players on their way to establish a second base and learn a number of important concepts and mechanics.
As for that political scandal (sort of). The Parliamentary election on Promitor went to the winner, ?????? (FOXV) corporation, and as soon as they won, they raised all production taxes to the Max and also transferred 25 million ICA from the government’s account to the governor’s private account. This clearly didn’t go over well.
The devs investigated and found that there were a number of recently registered accounts that turned out to essentially be puppet accounts created to sway this election and make a huge power grab. The offending accounts were banned, two of the elected candidates saw their votes disappear and all the taxes and fees went back down to their pre-election rates.
And puppet accounts got banned as a rule afterward. The team will also hide the live vote count to make it more difficult to try and game an election going forward.
