Hey Anglers,
As many of you know, a new Norway location was recently added on Steam, Epic Games, PlayStation, and Xbox, and will soon arrive on Mobile and Nintendo Switch. Our Planet keeps expanding and evolving, and as our fishing world grows deeper and more dynamic, we’re working to make sure every moment you spend in the game feels smooth, rewarding, and truly worth your time.
With that in mind, here’s a little behind-the-scenes sneak peek at what we’re working on right now. Future updates will bring a full range of quality-of-life improvements designed to refine and enhance the experience you already know and enjoy. We’ve named this future release Catch & Compete Update, and the next few DevDiaries will focus on the features it introduces.
Today, we’re starting with an important update to Competitive Activities - a brand-new Rating and Matchmaking System, built to make our competitions more balanced and open the door for players of all levels and angling skills. Please, be aware that for now this new Rating and Matchmaking System will apply specifically to Competitions, and won’t affect Tournaments or Custom Competitions.
From the questions we’ve been getting from players over time, it became clear that the previous rating system often felt overly complicated and hard to understand. At times, it felt like we were the guy in the meme below, trying to explain how it all worked 😉
The upcoming Competitive Rating system is built to be clear and fully transparent, with all information available right in the competition interface.
The Rating Points you earn will depend on your final placement. You’ll be able to see exactly how many points each position awards in the Competition Details window, under the Rewards tab. Competitions held on higher-level waterways offer a greater challenge and therefore will reward more Rating Points, while events on lower-level waterways will naturally grant fewer points.
Rest assured, if you already have a Competitive Rating in the game, it will be preserved. Once the new Rating System goes live, you’ll continue right from where you left off.
The system will analyze all the participants who registered in a competition and split them into separate groups based on their Competitive Rating. Players then compete only within their own group, each with its own leaderboard and results.
Each group will include players whose ratings are as close to each other as possible. This will help ensure that competition inside every group feels balanced, fair and transparent. The system will be dynamic, so groups in each competition may be divided differently depending on the number of participants and their ratings.
When the number of participants allows for multiple groups, the system will apply multi-phase combinatorial optimization, mathematically evaluating every possible distribution of groups until it converges on the fairest allocation. Exact arithmetic will eliminate rounding errors from the process entirely. As a result, every group composition will be the product of a rigorous, provably convergent optimization, not chance.
However, there will be a minimum number of participants required to create groups; if there are not enough participants, all players will compete in a single group. So, the more participants, the more chances you will get to compete with players who have angling skills similar to yours. We hope this will motivate more players to take part in competitions.
The UI will be quite comprehensive and transparent. Once matchmaking is complete you will see in which group you are, who competes with you in the same group, and the list of all participating groups.
Players will not see their exact position during the scoring period, but when it is over, the final leaderboard will become visible, clearly showing your placement within your group.
Please note, that with this new Matchmaking System it will be very important to know beforehand how many participants there are in every competition, so as for the system to properly divide all of the anglers into balanced groups. This is why registering for a competition without actually participating will result in a rating penalty.
That said, there also will be a few exceptions. You won’t be penalized if you withdraw before the competition starts, or if you catch at least one qualifying fish and then leave before the competition ends.
We hope this update will encourage more players to jump into competitive activities and make them a regular part of their game play. And now it’s your turn, we’d love to hear what you think. Your feedback plays a huge role in shaping Fishing Planet into a better place for every angler out there. Sometimes that feedback comes in a pretty emotional form, and that’s okay, we still listen and take notes, because we know that passion comes from those who care about the game, but still want to ask you to be constructive.
And here’s a small behind-the-scenes look at how it sometimes feels on our end 😁
Stay tuned for more that’s coming your way. Trust us, you don’t wanna miss it! We know many of you have been waiting for these changes. Stick with us over the next few weeks as we share more DevDiaries packed with new upcoming features.
Tight lines and see you on the water!
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*All visual content in this DevDiary is crafted to showcase the upcoming features; however, there may be differences upon the actual release of the update