Every catch now turns over a card
Until today a catch in flight ended with a toast: "New: Airbus A350-1000 · LEGENDARY", a small "+90 XP" and, if you were lucky, two more toasts for Feathers and Tridents. A mythical aircraft got exactly the same treatment as a common one. Ships didn't even get the big banner that the radar map had. The one thing you actually earned, the card with its photo and rarity, never appeared on screen at all.
What happens now
Press the shutter and the frame around your reticle flashes straight away, before our server has answered. Then the card comes out of your sights face down and hovers for a moment while the back glows in the colour of its tier. After that it flips over.
The rarer the catch, the longer that moment lasts and the more happens behind the card:
- Common is a quick "got it".
- Uncommon pulses once before the flip.
- Rare turns over with a burst of light and slow rays behind it.
- Epic adds flying shards and darkens the edges of the screen.
- Legendary cracks with light before turning, in slow motion.
- Mythical takes about four seconds, with an aurora behind the card.
Once the card is face up you can read the model and registration and see the real photo when we have one. A stamp tells you if it's a new card, a world first or a legendary ship. Below it your XP counts up and a bar fills toward your next rank, with that rank's crest waiting at the end.
When the card leaves, it flies up to your profile button in the corner. The Feathers and Tridents it paid follow it there: feathers flutter, tridents drop with a bounce and a clink. Achievement and streak banners now hand their coins over the same way.
Ships too, and your own photo
Vessel catches get the full reveal as well. Most ships have no reference photo, so the card wears the frame you just took of it. Your reticle is the centre of that frame, which is exactly where the card crops.
Small things that matter
- Tap the card to skip straight to the end. In flight the card sits away from your reticle, so you can keep flying while it plays.
- A repeat catch of a card you already own plays a short version, face up, with your catch counter ticking over.
- Three catches in quick succession play only the rarest in full. The rest go short, so you never wait through a queue.
- Sounds are on by default. There is a shutter click, a sting on the flip that grows with rarity, and the clink and rustle of coins. You can turn them off in Settings → Sound → Catch sounds.
- If your system asks apps to reduce motion, you get the card without the flip, particles and flying coins.
- On the radar map the card now uses the aircraft's model as its title instead of the callsign. The rarity belongs to the type, and a callsign only names today's flight.
What's next
Right now the card back, the stamps and the coins are drawn in code. We have commissioned proper artwork for them from the designer who made the rank crests: metal coins that match the crests, feathers, card backs for every tier and denser particles for the top tiers. When it arrives it replaces today's placeholders, and the Feather and Trident icons across the whole site will change with it.