Your cards have levels now
Until today a card in your collection carried exactly one badge: its rarity. Common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, mythical. That badge describes the aircraft — it is the same for every player who ever catches one, and it never moves. Catch your first A320 and catch your fiftieth and the card looks identical.
So a card had nothing to say about the part that was actually yours.
Levels
Every card now also carries a level, I to V, and it counts the children you have collected inside that one subject:
- a tail or a vessel counts the times you have met it
- a type counts how many different airframes of it you have caught
- an airline counts how many of its aircraft you have caught
- a manufacturer counts how many of its types you have collected
Different questions, different ladders. Meeting the same ship eight times is a relationship; catching eight different A320s is a hobby; collecting eight Airbus types is a project. One number could not have measured all three, so there are four.
The level rides on the badge that already showed your count — the level is literally what that count adds up to, so they belong in the same place. Hover it and it tells you where the next one is: Level III · 12 of 15 to IV.
Level I is not drawn. Every card would carry it, and a badge everybody has is not a badge.
Where the numbers came from
The ladders were not invented at a whiteboard. They were fitted to the deepest collection actually on the server — 414 cards — so that the top means something and the bottom does not clog.
On that collection the result is: 118 tails at I, thirteen at II, one at III. Ships: 209 at I, 57 at II, fifteen at III, one at IV. Types: 23 at I, five at III, one at IV — and exactly one card in the entire game at V.
That is the shape we wanted. Level II should be an ordinary thing to see; III should feel like you did something; V should be singular enough that when a second one appears, its owner notices. A ladder whose top rung nobody can reach is decoration. A ladder everyone maxes in a week is a participation badge.
What this is not
It is not a second rarity. Rarity is a property of the machine and stays exactly as it was — a common A320 is still common at level V, and that combination is the interesting one: the most ordinary aircraft in the sky, collected further than anyone else bothered to.
It is also not a new currency, and it costs nothing to have. Every number it uses was already in your collection; nothing was migrated, nothing was reset, and every card you have ever caught got its level the moment this shipped.