my idea of a rating system would also mean that the higher your rating the better missions you can get as well. so they could be worth more money to you. especially at the very start of the game it would be nice to see that your hard work is somehow paying off.
The further away from Sol you get the better the missions get, the more missions you do and the more you upgrade your ships the further away from Sol you can travel. I don't see it as especially hard to notice that your hard work pays off as you play, it might be a bit slow at the start though.
Personally I'm not that big a fan of exp point systems in games like this where it's sort of a sandbox style game where you can do whatever you want. Idk why it just doesn't feel like it fits to me.
Irredrache, I would imagine all of those things you are talking about would just be seperate categories, so somebody could be tops in Total SoS missions completed while someone else could be tops in Money made off SoS missions. Though people have in the past mentioned they didn't necessarily want everyone to know how many of each mission type they are doing for various reasons. People like Dazz would like to be able to keep track of their own operations though so I do kind of wish there was some kind of mission tracking system in place and SirEmi could just make the information private and only viewable in a small link from your SITREP page or something like that, then if people wanted to share that information they could do so. As for who the best overall miner/explorer etc is I'm not sure how to deal with that. Because honestly like you said different people approach mining and exploring differently because they value some things differently. Some people will probably say your profit from mining matters the most while others think the overall amount of minerals you mine should matter more. Because of that it's kind of hard to come up with exp values for each action that will be fair/make everyone happy.
Dazz the tricky thing about putting some sort of rating system on the difficulty/danger of combat missions is that they scale based on your ship power and unless I've forgotten/am mistaken there is no actual maximum difficulty/danger level. So say you have a hii-jacking mission with a pirate ship that has 5 mil power, maybe that might be considered as an elite level or high danger mission (It would have been like two years ago maybe lol) but as the players get stronger something like that would become not only routine but even low difficulty compared to what they can do later on. You can end up with a situation where you have a ranking system like this:
Total power of Pirate Forces: Easy - =< 100k power, Normal =< 300k power, Hard =<750k power, Elite =< 1.5 mil power
Only a majority of the players at this point never actually see a combat mission below 1.5 mil power so there is nothing "elite" about them.
That might just be my own personal opinion but in a game that grows according to the growth of the players a static rating system just doesn't fit if you ask me. Now if SirEmi could track each of the COM missions that is done in game and then sort them out to come up with a sort of average and have those ranks change based on the average power of the opposing pirate/alien forces in COM missions that are completed then that would be a more complete ranking system for this kind of game imo. But he might think that is more work than it's worth lol.
The only real limit on COM missions at the moment is patience of the players with the combat timers getting longer and longer as power gets higher. Hopefully SirEmi will re-do the combat system to fix that problem because high power combat is basically pointless. I'm almost surprised that pirates can't leave the area before the timer finishes considering some of the COM missions people like Jam, Mata and Raphel do could probably last for a week or two. Assuming that gets fixed then who knows how high the power for COM missions could get and it would completely redefine what is a Normal COM mission and what is an Elite mission.