What's New This Week? #4 - ATS and ETS2 Updates, Skill Progression Rebalance.

Good morning drivers! Hope everyone had a great new years!

2024 was definitely a wild ride... but should we be concerned January 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 2025 shows up as "WTF" when looking at the calendar? (o_0)

I also want to take this time to thank all of our Patreon subscribers; and our free members who have recently made purchases.

At our current rate, I am expecting to see increasing sales and growth over the next few months, which in turn frees up time for me to focus on the economy mod and its add-ons. Being able to go full-time into working on this would be amazing, BUT I won't hold my breath there just yet. We have a lonnggg way to go before we get there; but hey you never know... 

I have recently invested in some powerful tools and software that I began utilizing for the economy mod and it has increased productivity substantially as it makes doing a lot of the task I've been pretty much doing on my own the past few months so much easier; hence the fairly rapid updates we've seen in the first half of December last month. I hope that this trend will continue going forward as I truly enjoy this kind of work and seeing you guys satisfied with the results.

__

What's Planned for January?

ATS Updates: 

To start things off, within the next 48 hours we're looking at a Cargo Rate Adjustments and a Fuel Prices Update for American Truck Simulator. This update will include fuel prices/fuel card support for Coast to Coast, Pro Mods Canada, and East Meets Mid North Maps.

Following up on this, the next step will be additional updates to Police/Fine Data for ATS; as well as revised truck wear/damage data; particularly in regards to tires. The target goal was to have tires reach at least 350'000 miles before reaching 65% wear, of which they will be consider Out of Service by the games enforcement system at weigh stations. We believe after some excessive testing; we accomplished this goal and are able to import these settings into the public release of the economy mod.

Additional Used Truck Market Reworks: It is also planned add another pool of used trucks to the market; with an end-goal for the month of January to have at least 100 custom built used trucks that are based on real life trucks currently available for sale IRL across all the current in-game brands, such as the 2021 Peterbilt 579 pictured above that is currently available in the full version add-on.

This has proven to be a tedious process with the trucks that have currently been added to the full version add-on of the economy mod, but I feel it is the best course of action for it results in accurate truck specifications and styling, and even availability compared to the default SCS settings. As some of you full version add-on users may have noticed already, the Freightliner Cascadia and Volvo VNL's are now becoming primarily dominant in the used truck market in game, reflective of real life.

This will also open the door to converting the publicly available steam workshop versions of the economy mod to a "Demo" for the full version by placing a handful of the reworked used trucks/quick job trucks into it and give players a better representation of what the full version has to offer.

The used truck market will also undergo a slight revision in regards to overall truck condition were the cabin and chassis wear will be rebalanced as current settings seem to not reflect the wear rates seen when a player has physically owned a truck from new. This will result in severely damage trucks being less likely in the used truck market, and may also raise the overall value of certain trucks; but it is expected that used trucks will still remain relatively affordable for hard working drivers.

ETS2 Updates:

Now that the baseline for expectations and settings have been more thoroughly polished for ATS; work can soon begin on an update for economy mods for ETS2, including the introduction of a Full Version Add-on. Work is set to begin on this around mid to late January; with an official launch of the Full Version Add-on set for March of this year.

A long overdue cargo rate and fuel prices update is also planned; as well as support for fuel cards. These fuel cards will work for both ATS and ETS2; so players who have already obtained a fuel card, know that you will not need to make any additional purchases; as certain mods can work interchangeably between the two games. We will just simply need to add the ETS2 data to the currently available fuel cards in a future update. Once available for ETS2, just install into your mod folder and activate in the mod manager, and you will be good to go :)

Skill Progression Rebalance for Hardcore Edition:

Now that there has been a larger number of players reaching the dreaded "Level 10" for the hardcore edition of the economy mod; we are looking into revising the skill progression to better match the initial expectations we had in regards to how quickly/slowly a player progressed.

It is currently running a bit faster than expected; due in part to skill unlocks contributing to a boost in players XP.

We do not find this to be a drastic issue as the hardcore edition is still very difficult; but do find that it should be rebalanced in the to better match the hardcore editions expected grind.

Should this plan be followed through, players may end up being knocked down a level or two, possibly three; and players will NOT unlock any new skills until their profile catches back up to the new settings despite releveling up to the previous level. This will not cause any profile issues; as this is something we are familiar with when it came to players who had default game profiles and enabled the classic edition of the economy mod long ago.

Don't let this news freak you out too much, we will of course have a beta of these new settings that players will experiment with; and only after some serious feedback and decision making will we decide if it is appropriate to move forward and place these new settings into the public release of the economy mod.

Let me know your thoughts!

-Busy