[ok] Changes to Alliance Scoring
Sigma:
This isn't a big deal as it's nothing more than bragging rights I suppose, but there's a couple issues with the way Alliances are scored under the first pass of integrating it into the game, but one in particular I see has a pretty huge deal-breaker.
I was looking through all the alliances in the Alliance Challenge game, trying to determine if the hugely differing scores between alliances was readily apparent, and I found that it really wasn't. A top scoring Alliance didn't look all that different from a bottom-scoring one, everyone had a fair mix of larger and smaller airlines developing, no one seemed to be dominating in particular, though the scores were vastly different. Then I went to look how the scoring is determined and I found a pretty glaring issue with it...
The vast majority of the score is the "Variable" component. A single player could theoretically earn up to 80 points, a pretty huge number really. The problem is with the statistics that are currently being used to gather that score:
1> Fleet Utilization
2> Profit Margin
3> Load Factor
4> Transported Pax
But there's one big problem with that list.... 3 of those 4 statistics (utilization, margins, and LFs) are almost exclusively dominated by new/tiny airlines. For countless obvious reasons, large airlines almost never rank near the top of those stats and they are usually made up of airlines of 1 or 2 aircraft either just starting out or that were abandoned by a player shortly after beginning and are just stagnating. So the reason I couldn't really see why an Alliance was ranked as the "best" was because they weren't necessarily dominating the game world in sheer size yet, but rather that they had a number of tiny little airlines just starting up with a single aircraft, that were actually contributing more (a lot more) points than already established, growing ones. Which, of course, makes no sense at all.
Which lends itself to a pretty big exploit -- All I've got to do to get a crazy amount of points is get a handful of people to join my Alliance about 3 months before the end of a game, tell them all to lease a plane or two, spend no money on Marketing and just barebones everything to get the best margins, and just fly it on the most unfilled and longest route they can. Their utilization, margins, and LFs will be great, they'll jump to the top of those respective lists, and they'll contribute FAR more points than any airline playing in an Alliance from the beginning could ever hope to achieve because few very large airlines could ever dream of placing anywhere near the Top 20 of 3 of those 4 stats.
Now I'm not saying that anyone's going to do the above exploit and that reason in particular is why it needs to be changed, I'm just using that to emphasize the point that those numbers in particular are completely meaningless to determine the "best" Alliance and, in fact, the chosen scoring system would actually far better lend itself to determining the youngest Alliance, not the "best" one. A newer Alliance in the world wouldn't have much time to accumulate negative Cumulative points and are far more likely to rank higher in 3 of the 4 variable point categories than a long-standing, larger airline would, therefore would almost certainly have a much better score.
doing2030@hotmail.com:
I absolutely agree with you and I can't believe the this thread hasn't generated more heat.
One of my biggest gripes is that the accounting system 'cash accounts' which produces wild swings in profit margin.
E.g when you put a deposit down for an aircraft this gets taken off revenue as a cost in the income statement. In real life the downpayment or even the purchase price would go to the balance sheet as an asset with the resulting depreciation being the only thing that effects the income statement.
swiftus27:
Quote from: doing2030@hotmail.com on August 24, 2010, 01:24:14 PM
I absolutely agree with you and I can't believe the this thread hasn't generated more heat.
One of my biggest gripes is that the accounting system 'cash accounts' which produces wild swings in profit margin.
E.g when you put a deposit down for an aircraft this gets taken off revenue as a cost in the income statement. In real life the downpayment or even the purchase price would go to the balance sheet as an asset with the resulting depreciation being the only thing that effects the income statement.
Trust me, we know GAAP isnt applied here.
doing2030@hotmail.com:
I was thinking perhaps IFRS (nothing like sad accounting banter!!)
RushmoreAir:
http://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,20723.0.html
We really need Accrual Method accounting!
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