Ahoy Mateys,

Some of you may have already heard that we’re doing another round of Stat Compression with our 14.03 Release. This time the compression will only affect PvP content.

I know that any time a number gets smaller it’s natural to feel uneasy, especially when you’ve invested so much into making sure that your fleets and bases are competitive. We’ve put together this document to assuage some of those fears.

First off, Stat Compression is not a rebalance. It’s simply taking the numbers across the game and making them smaller, but still preserving the power value for a particular hull. The newer hulls will still be more powerful than the older hulls, so this compression will not sacrifice the work you’ve put into earning and upgrading your Conqueror fleets or base defense content.

The problem is that the stat numbers are getting so large that they become difficult for humans to rationalize and at a certain point (around 2 billion) impossible for the game to parse. This sort of rapid escalation of values is bound to happen when a game has been around for 10 years, just as needing to compress them down was bound to happen as a result.

With armor values in the 100s of millions, we essentially have 3 significant digits and 6 digits that don't matter at all. It's not uncommon for a game like ours to do a stat compression, and after 10 years of operation we're due for one. 

What does all of this mean for you, the player? Actually, not much. We've done the math to make sure that the performance of hulls as well as base defense content should be the same before and after the compression. Think of it this way; the armor of a T12 conqueror and the damage of a T12 defender weapon have been compressed by the same factor, so the relation between incoming damage and amount of armor that the weapon has to chew through hasn’t changed. The same has been done in the opposite relation (conqueror damage vs. defender armor) This has been done across all tiers. 

Ultimately, this stat compression is more a visual change than an actual gameplay change, only in how the numbers look in the stat block. Of course, we’ll be keeping a close eye on performance, and will make any adjustments needed if things seem to be off, but your ships should still perform the same against targets. PvE should not be affected.