So after many days of being confused about this score. The community has a clearer picture of the game actions that this metric is based on when scoring the player after a career mode mission.
The entire score is based around the quantity of “correct” ATC interactions. Note I quoted correct because we’re talking about what the game considered correct, not what is actually correct in real life.
Not only this, but the score can go into negative percentages because someone improperly programmed this to translate a nominal score to a percent representation, let me explain in detail.
First, let us take a theoretical flight with 1 ATC interaction. If one were to not respond to ATC and the game consider it a failed interaction, you would be 0 for 1 interactions. To any normal human being that has taken basic arithmetic, this is 0/1 or 0%. This is not how the game does it. The game starts at some base value, probably 0, and subtracts. To the game, that failed interaction is -1, not 0 for 1. At the end of the flight they simply convert this nominal value to a percentage so it fits on the screen with the other percentages. Even though this is not a percent, or how percentage work at all. This is a massive part of the player confusion.
To get a high procedure score, you have to spam cancel IFR, and request flight following, or spam request vector to next waypoint. If you do proper ATC on short to medium flights, you will get bad procedure scores simply because there is not a large enough quantity of them to get a high score. This is because, on top of being able to get negative percentages due to improper representation of a nominal score, there is some arbitrary invisible bar someone has set. This can also result in scores above 100%.
To be clear, the percentage is not a percent. It is a percent representation of a nominal value so it looks good on the screen next to other percentages. This can result in negative and above 100 percentages. The bar to get 100% is arbitrary to that nominal score (not an actual percent remember). So scores above 100% are possible if you spam ATC interactions.
This entire metric needs to change to make any kind of rational sense to a normal human. The calculation should be
(good ATC interactions) / (total ATC interactions). This would result in
- An actual percentage (yay we can do arithmetic \o/)
- Short flights can now get high scores as well.
- The score would be relative to the flights you’re doing, not some arbitrary invisible bar.
EDIT: Seeing as this system is in the game in the first place, and we can make no assumptions, I guess I should note that the developer should also check for 0 total interactions and not do the calculation and have some solution for that because obviously dividing by 0 is bad if we had zero interactions. We don’t want to crash the game. My suggestion would be to give out 100% score if there were zero interactions, but you are free to come up with your own solution as long as it actually makes sense to the player.