It is a new feature to enhance gameplay in SD by removing things like Mapgen and ranking watching which in SD turns out to be the big players farming from the bottom up.  If you don't have a ranking system to tell you who is at the bottom then you have to look for yourself and allows for the slower start people to have a better chance at catching up by staying under the radar and living longer to fight another day.  Think of it like back in the day when you had to search for morale planets, now you have to actually look at the map and pay more attention to the galaxy as a whole and no just find the smallest guy with planets and steal them!

Promotes competition and effort in SD!  Great job Mods!

lol how lame is this for real?

Instead of closing SD while fixing the bugs and extra players, its was made nonpublic. Gave mod's access to it without being blocked as well by closing it. Nonpublic also means its hidden, an unfortunate side effect, but...it does have point in competition wise. I like the idea of not bottom feeding off easy targets for first few hits. Makes it more work to find the "easier" targets and gives lesser players a chance to grow more.

Planets in HS not explorable, market use now found in recent reports, no rankings

This shiz is wacked!