Price management update

[JumboShrimp]

No, the whole concept of default prices will be faded away (and hence any % or $ comparisons vs. default won't happen)... (discussed previously, .. somewhere)

My understanding is that the ticket price is a basic function of a line - slope intercept:

y = mx + b

Where:

y - is the price
m - slope - price per nm
b - intercept - base price, distant independent, to pay for passenger handling, customer service, landing fees etc.
x - distance

deriving these key variables m and b is absolutely impossible for average player to derive reasonable values for these, and it is the most helpful that the system derives them for us in form of a default price.

Pushing us into the wilderness by denying us this basic guide will result in a lot of players being completely lost...

Any sort of price management that does not start from this basic formula as a base (automatically adjusted for inflation, general cost of business), and let players go up / down from this base is just going to turn into a dead end, IMO.

I understand, but certainly you don't plan on having every player inputting a price on every route?  Even if you don't compare against the default price, perhaps a value comparing against the average price on the routes you fly?  So if you fly LHR to JFK and the average price is $1000 and yours is $1100 then you would simply do sum(your price on all route pairs) / sum(avg price on all route pairs) = your pricing vs average.

This would compare your pricing against everyone else's without using the default values.

So if a newb prices his ticket at $100, would you be fine to derive your pricing from that?

[LemonButt]

Stand back and take a deep breath Jumbo, lol.

I'm just talking about aggregate pricing on the price management page, not individual routes.  I'd be interested to know two things.  First is how my pricing stacks up to my competitors on a percentage basis--I know my prices are higher, I just don't know if it is 5% or 25%.  Second would be the overall pricing for everyone else, i.e. am I the most expensive airline in the gameworld or one of the cheapest?  It wouldn't reveal anything about a user's route pricing, but be a result of their overall pricing strategy for all their routes.

For pricing, I believe sami said it would work like pricing for aircraft where there is a low/high suggested price and you can pick a value in between or go wild and price it lower/higher.  Nonetheless, I am still a believe in default prices over a range as AWS is already micromanagement hell compared to other airline simulators, which is both a good (immersion) and bad (tedious) feature of AWS.  We're paying a bunch of staff to do stuff so being able to set strategy/policy and delegate is the logical next step in improving pricing IMO.  This would also allow you to charge dynamic versus static prices.  For example, every seat in coach costs $150 right now whereas IRL the first 30% sold might be $100, the next 30% $150, the next 20% $175, and the last 20% $250.  The last seat on an aircraft is always the most expensive.

[JumboShrimp]

Stand back and take a deep breath Jumbo, lol.

I'm just talking about aggregate pricing on the price management page, not individual routes.  I'd be interested to know two things.  First is how my pricing stacks up to my competitors on a percentage basis--I know my prices are higher, I just don't know if it is 5% or 25%.  Second would be the overall pricing for everyone else, i.e. am I the most expensive airline in the gameworld or one of the cheapest?  It wouldn't reveal anything about a user's route pricing, but be a result of their overall pricing strategy for all their routes.

On individual route, I doubt that Sami will reveal your competitor pricing - even though, in real life, it is not difficult to find out what a competitor is charging.

Globally, I am sure there are 10s if not 100s of players in the game who did not touch their pricing for a decade.  Does it make sense for you to take their pricing as and input for your pricing, even on the routes no one else but you is flying?

For pricing, I believe sami said it would work like pricing for aircraft where there is a low/high suggested price and you can pick a value in between or go wild and price it lower/higher.  Nonetheless, I am still a believe in default prices over a range as AWS is already micromanagement hell compared to other airline simulators, which is both a good (immersion) and bad (tedious) feature of AWS.

Pricing is micromanagement hell, which could either get better, by giving up the ability to price our routes as a percentage of the "default" pricing, or it could get a lot worse by removing the guide of default pricing.

Right now, at least we have a partial answer to the micromanagement hell: Reset to default, repeat annually, spend more time with your family.

[marxen]

Hi,
i want to add something for better price management. It would be nice to have an selection of the average price for the route. It makes price Management much easier and faster...

SELECTION
average of competitors on route
per base
per aircraft fleet
per aircraft (reg/msn)
per aircraft model
per airport
per LF
free selection checkbox
per route type (dom/lh/sh)
per departure local time



ADJUSTMENT OF SELECTED ROUTES

per travel class:

free sum
+/- %
+/- certain $
reset all
reset selected
reset all but selected



ADJUSTMENT OF ALL ROUTES AT ONCE

per travel class:

+/- %
+/- certain $
reset all

[sam12t]

Another one of those features which would just make the game that much better. I agree

[Kof]

Price management is a major issue with the game IMO. It's really starting to annoy me. It's fiddly and unrewarding. I'm starting to dread it, especially with 7 day schedules increasing the number of flights that have to be price managed. There's no logical reason that a 7 day flight has to become a flight multiplier, from a price management perspective.

In any case, price management shouldn't require microing every price for every flight, it should be automated. It's not hard to do. It doesn't have to be triggered automatically, give us a button to trigger it and some options we an set prior to this, such as if an LF if > x%, increase the price by y%.

Why do we have to price resets for inflation? Prices should just match inflation, automatically, unless we want to turn it off, surely. It feels like I'm fine tuning my pricing based on demand, then it either goes out of date because of inflation, or because I have to reset it (for inflation). The only reason I should have to reset prices is because of a change in demand, or because I want to for some reason.

This is a serious playability issue in my opinion. It's getting on my goat BIG time and I would have to consider carefully before I'd embark on another epic GW again based on this, i.e. do you really want to go through the price reset cycle another 100 times?

Anyway, just my tuppence.

[Kof]

Update to my recent post:

It has been brought to my attention that the "Destination view" filter (via number 1 in below illustration) on the manage routes screen, allows updating all sub-routes in one go (via number 2 in below illustration), this alleviates the 7 Day schedule multiplier effect.


Other aspects of the request stand, just wanted to share in case this was also news to anyone else. Thanks to Groundbum for the info.