Michi looks back at March and April: server performance gets a major boost and a political crisis unfolds on Promitor.
Performance Month
March kicked off with Michi continuing his investigation into the game's server performance. At almost 90% utilization the garbage collector was running overtime, burning through precious CPU cycles. After finding that game entities were holding onto event cache data far longer than necessary, a targeted fix brought heap usage back under control, no extra servers required. A second culprit was also tracked down: the CXM command was accidentally requesting full data for all ~5,000 planets even when no planet filter was given, creating unnecessary load. With both issues patched, the pod restart count, which had been almost daily, dropped dramatically.
Even after those fixes, players continued reporting sluggish response times, so Michi dug deeper. The investigation pointed to how the game handles scheduled commands, these are internal triggers that fire events like ending a flight segment or updating a contract. Determining the next scheduled command for an entity requires checking all of its behaviors (ships, contracts, bases, and more), which turned out to be expensive for larger, older companies. After deploying extra logging, the data pointed to the population, workforce, and rating behaviors as the worst offenders. The fix: smart caching with "dirty flags" to avoid redundant recalculations. The result was a significant reduction in CPU load. As a bonus, chat channels and the COM list also got a speed boost.
Faction Influence Takes Shape
Work continued on the long-term faction influence system. Michi outlined three sources of influence generation: workforce satisfaction (pioneers contribute the least, scientists the most), government participation (governors and MPs earn influence based on their planet's population size), and faction contracts (the higher the contract's faction reputation, the more influence it generates). All influence flows from companies → planets → systems → factions on a daily cycle. Since these changes aren't player-visible yet, Fabian is collecting data in the background to fine-tune the numbers before anything goes live.
When the influence transfers were first deployed in April, the servers struggled. Transferring influence from thousands of companies to planets simultaneously, and then triggering a client-side update for every single one of those transfers, proved too much. After staggering the transfers over half an hour and fixing the synchronization mechanism to send only one update per completed cycle rather than one per transfer, stability returned. No more nightly restarts.
New Player Experience
With performance in better shape, attention turned to new player experience. Three improvements landed in the existing tutorial: a new step highlighting the NOTS (notifications) button, a reminder notification when players forget to pick up materials from a contract condition, and a fix for the flight tutorial that now dynamically shows the correct commodity exchange station code for each starting faction.
A post-tutorial contract series is also in the works, designed to guide new players toward founding their second base by walking them through key early-game concepts: constructing additional buildings, fulfilling faction contract offers, buying consumables, earning money, keeping their workforce satisfied, and finally picking a spot for expansion. The series wraps up with a supply of building materials to help kick off the new base. There will be seven new contracts in total, and we currently test them on the test server. In parallel, Fabian is designing a pre-company-creation tutorial to help newcomers understand the core mechanics before they have to make any lasting decisions.
Election Turmoil on Promitor
April's biggest story, however, wasn't a technical one. Michi woke up one morning to over 15 Discord message requests, signaling that something unusual had happened. The parliamentary election on Promitor had ended with the 琉璃主权资本 (FOXV) corporations winning three out of five seats. With the majority secured, they lost no time and immediately raised all production taxes to the allowed maximum and transferred 25 million ICA from the government's account to the governor's private account. Community reaction was swift and loud.
An investigation revealed a pattern of accounts that had registered recently, had almost no in-game progress, and had done little beyond casting votes. After reviewing voting, account, and payment data side by side, the team concluded these were puppet accounts created solely to sway the election — a clear violation of the terms of service. The accounts were deleted, two of the elected candidates lost all their supporting votes and were removed from parliament. Taxes and fees were reset to their pre-election values.
In response, a new "No puppet accounts" rule was added to the game's rules. On the game design side, Michi switched the voting system to approval voting (players can vote for as many candidates as they approve of). Additionally, the live vote count during active elections has been hid to make it harder to game the numbers. Sending out a reminder notification a day before elections close has helped to increase voter turnout. The parliament size has been increased to seven seats for the most heavily populated planets.
You can find the individual devlogs here:
- Collecting Garbage - Development Log #520
- Generating Influence - Development Log #521
- Looking for Performance Gaps - Development Log #522
- Performance Improvements - Development Log #523
- New Player Experience - Development Log #524
- Influence Generation Issues - Development Log #525
- Additional Contracts - Development Log #526
- Election Turmoil - Development Log #527
- Election Aftermath - Development Log #528
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!