It's hard not to notice that the rank system is broken along with everything else (really, it takes a special effort to actually break every single thing in a release).
It turns out the rank system is only MOSTLY broken (insert princess bride meme here). Horizons and Odyssey ARE tracking rank points, but accounting and progressions are busted and interacting strangely.
Odyssey:
- Odyssey has both display and promotion problems, but your rank points ARE accumulating
- status window shows your rank before Odyssey dropped and will not change. will get stuck at 100% if you reach it.
- rank-up missions will spawn when you accumulate 100% of that original rank, over and over again
- completing the mission will generate a toast email with the next rank, repeatedly
- completing the mission will NOT rank you up or give you rank benefits
- in other words treat rank up missions like normal missions
Horizons:
- Everything works EXCEPT displaying your correct rank progress
- your rank points are accumulating
- rank-up missions work as designed
- completing the mission will generate an accurate toast email with real rank
- completing the mission will rank you up and give you access to systems and ships
- status screen will show your rank from Odyssey AS IF THE FAKE RANK-UPS really did promote you. If you switch back and forth this quickly becomes meaningless.
- status will show empty rank if this fake rank is above 'king'/'admiral'
Workaround:
- you can accumulate points as per usual in Odyssey but you can't get any of the benefits because you can't rank up.
- If you want to rank up you have to switch back to Horizons and complete rank-up missions. Your accumulated points carry over, but remember that ranks get progressively harder so 8 repeated promotions from Squire to Knight in Odyssey's wonky implementation do not mean you have the actual points for Duke.
- After you rank up you can go back to Odyssey and continue trying to do stuff.
Fun fact:
- ED will report your weird Odyssey/Horizons pseudo-rank to the api if you have tried to rank up in Odyssey, so Inara, etc. cannot show the correct value.
Another fun fact:
- This is stupidly easy to test automatically for regression. It is very worrying that this was released as it shows an almost insurmountable degree of sloppy coding process.