The rank crests, at full size
Yesterday the career ranks got their crests: fifteen cast-metal shields, from the chick in a nest to Poseidon's trident. Each one took real drawing time. Then we put them on the site at eleven to twenty pixels, the size of an emoji. Below eighteen pixels the game doesn't even draw the crest, it swaps in a small tier mark. In practice most players saw the full art once, for a few seconds, when they ranked up.
So today the crests move to places where they can be seen.
The ladder is a gallery. /ranks used to be a list of names with a small icon each. It is now a grid of cards with the crest at 112 pixels. Each card is edged in its own metal, from silver through bronze, steel and gold to the lavender of the top tier. If you are signed in, ranks you have passed get a tick, your current one glows with a progress bar to the next, and the ranks ahead show as dimmed silhouettes. Signed out, the page shows every crest in colour, because it's a catalogue and we don't know where you stand.
Your profile shows your crest. The Career section on your page now opens with your crest at 88 pixels. At the end of the progress bar sits the next crest as a silhouette, so you can see what you are working towards.
Rank-ups are bigger. The celebration screen draws the crest at up to 168 pixels instead of 96, and shrinks it to fit a phone held sideways.
Tap a rank mark to see the crest. The small marks next to names in the online list, the lobby, your profile header and the account menu now open a card with the crest at 128 pixels. With a mouse, hovering is enough. The marks inside links and buttons still do what they did before.
Share a rank. The rank-up screen and your current card on /ranks have a Share button. It opens your phone's share sheet or copies a link. The link goes to the ladder, and its preview in chats shows the crest of that rank. When a player reaches one of the top ranks, the post in our Discord now carries the crest too.
On a phone, the account card at the top of the menu shows your crest a size up as well.
Nothing about how ranks are earned has changed. XP still only goes up, and the ladder is the same fifteen steps.
Frames in the player lists. Later the same day the new rank frames reached the online list and the lobby. Every signed-in player's picture now wears the frame of their tier, so you can tell a fresh pilot from a veteran at a glance without reading anything. The frame took the place of the small tier dot that used to sit after the name, and tapping the picture opens the same crest card. On a phone the lists open full screen, and there the pictures are a size larger. The online list didn't show pictures at all before, so it picked those up along the way. Guests stay as they were: a flag and a country.