Is Airway sim dying?

[Sanabas]

But with respect to sami's original question of whether it takes a long time to manage an airline in this game, my answer is that it does, because of several game features which tend to give players who spend hours an advantage, and because players who log in only once per day can be attacked by players who spend hours, thus requiring the players under attack to either also spend hours, or BK, or move to an airport that no one else would ever want to go to.

There's a difference between 'you MUST be online more often than 30 minutes/day to be successful' and 'being online for hours per day gives you an advantage'. The second one is certainly true, but I don't think that's a problem. If the sim was simple enough that 15 minutes a day or 6 hours a day made no difference to what you were able to do, it wouldn't be interesting enough for me to play. But I don't think the first statement is true at all. If you want to start MT today, and be in a size 5 airport with 6 other people, then yeah, you'll need to be online a bit more for the next fortnight, or you'll likely be forced to BK. But to suggest that your only other option is 'to move to an airport no one else would ever want to go to' is unrealistic hyperbole. There are lots of airports that are big enough to be very successful, without the guaranteed cutthroat competition of the top 25 airports. To some extent it's luck-based, you can pick a biggish airport with only 1 or 2 competitors (Bogota, Brasilia, Brisbane, Seattle, Osaka, Lisbon, Mumbai are all big enough to build a monster airline if that's what you want, but only have 1 or 2 people there currently), but you don't know if those 1 or 2 are less experienced/more casual players, or extremely experienced, aggressive players. You might get a level playing field, you might have an advantage, you might find that the disadvantage of limited access can't be overcome against one of those players. Once the gameworld is established, as DOTM currently is, it's very easy to find an airport where you can be very successful being online just 30 minutes/day. You're constrained by how the gameworld has developed, but there won't be a shortage of biggish airports with relatively easy competition levels. Which airports they are will just change from world to world.

Do you have to be online more than 30 minutes/day to start in HND/LAX/AMS on day 1 and wind up as the biggest airline in that airport? Absolutely.

Do you have to be online more than 30 minutes/day to start in a size 5 airport, and build a very large, successful airline? not at all. You need to play well, and if you have bad luck in who your competitors are, your inability to react quickly may spell doom, but with a bit of good luck, you'll be fine.

Do you have to be online more than 30 minutes/day to start 5 years in and build a large, profitable airline? Absolutely not. You have to work around what's already happened, some airports won't be available, some new planes will have queues too long to use, but you'll still have plenty of options, and almost zero risk of being forced to BK through lack of online time.

[JumboShrimp]

I would say that can be true up until the point that the players at the large airlines decide that your base looks mighty delicious.  

Just responding to this one point.  It is a combination of base and airlines at the base.  Weak airlines attract more competition than strong airlines.  It takes me only seconds to spot if an airline is weak.

Some players don't realize (or lose concentration) from the main point of the game, which is profit.  And CV as a function of all accumulated profits.  If you are doing poorly at this stat, than your base does indeed look delicious.

But if your airline is solidly profitable, employing a sound strategy, it looks very un-appetizing to others.  Remember, you have an advantage in lower costs, number of aircraft you can deploy and home base LF advantage...

[JumboShrimp]

Oh, boy.  I think we're talking in circles.  No one is asking for the sim to be dumbed down.  I believe my whole point so far has been that increasing the number of game worlds necessarily dilutes the number of veteran game players per world, increases the options for all players, and allows for a more forgiving game experience. 

On the number of concurrent games, I agree.  We could certainly use double the number of games.  The time between game starts is too long.  Having 2x of each game era world running would also lead to more people playing.  Quite a few players prefer to start on day 1 and would rather wait for the next game world than start in the middle...

A game reservation system would help judge the demand (of players to play AWS) fairly accurately.  I would open reservation for MT8 for example, one month into MT7, and set up a criteria when it will start.  As in:
- when number of registrations reaches a threshold (325 players?)
- no later than than a given date.

[swiftus27]

Jesus man, your post count is insane. heh heh   

[Sanabas]

On the number of concurrent games, I agree.  We could certainly use double the number of games.  The time between game starts is too long.  Having 2x of each game era world running would also lead to more people playing.  Quite a few players prefer to start on day 1 and would rather wait for the next game world than start in the middle...

A game reservation system would help judge the demand (of players to play AWS) fairly accurately.  I would open reservation for MT8 for example, one month into MT7, and set up a criteria when it will start.  As in:
- when number of registrations reaches a threshold (325 players?)
- no later than than a given date.

Agree completely. Especially about the long wait for a new day 1. Could also offer a bit more variation that way, too. Both in game length and start date, rather than the current 3, ~25 year game worlds spanning roughly the same years each time. I want a game world where I can try and use concorde. But can't do it in JA, because they arrive too close to the end to make use of them, and can't do it in DOTM, becuase the production line's not open long enough. 1965-1995 or similar (or one very long world while 4 or 5 25 year worlds run), and I can finally go bankrupt in serious style. 

[JumboShrimp]

So, moving on from the personal stuff to the substance: you raise an interesting point regarding the market-call system. I think it is a very good way to counteract botting. However, it is also a good example of a design feature which encourages living in front of the computer and/or playing for hours per day (which is the only topic on which I have stated an opinion here). Because players get 7 calls per game week, or approximately one call per gay day, and the AI brokers' blocks of planes also seem to be loaded once per game day (or something like that), if you want to be able to get hotly demanded planes on the used market (or get the best deals on medium-demand planes in good condition), you have a big advantage if you can be at the computer and call the market every 30-40 real world minutes. (And the same thing is true, to a lesser extent, for slots at high-demand airports, since players' unused slots get confiscated and relisted once per day also.)

If you only log in one one day in a game week (once per 3.5 hours or so in real life), or once per real-life day, you will have calls being "wasted" and expiring. And, if you use all 7 of your weekly calls during 30 real-world minutes, it won't help you any more than just calling 1 or 2 times during that 30-minute period would, since the brokers' plane blocks are not loaded that frequency.

So, going with the used-market example, a way to level the playing field a little between players who can live in front of the computer and players who can only log in once per day, would be, for example, to give players 31 market calls per game month, expiring at the end of the month rather than the end of each week, and divide up the broker planes into smaller, more frequently loaded batches (so that a player who calls the market 3-4 times in a game day will be able to see more results that day than a player who only calls once; the trade-off being that the first player will have used up a lot of his calls until the next time he logs in, whereas the second player call still call once per day for the following 2-3 days). That would allow people who only log in 1-2 times per real world day to make the most of their time during those 1-2 logins, if the game designer wants to do that.

This is a subject that is very dear to me, and you make a lot of good points.  I have mentioned some of them myself in the past.

The current used market system is a vast improvement of what we had before, and it is also an improvement as far as how much time you have to spend in front of a computer.

But it is certainly not enough as far as leveling the playing field between player logging in once per day vs. several times per day.

As far as calls, those are issues early in the game worlds.  Number of calls becomes less important in 2nd half of the game, when plenty of aircraft is available.  And number of calls would make no difference to a player playing once per day, since all you would realistically get is a single refresh of the market in your 1 hour online.

The issue becomes the limit on number of aircraft you can get from UM in day, week.  Logging in once per RL day for one hour, you are limited to 3 aircraft per RL day = 3 aircraft per game month.  Player logged in all the time can get ~12 aircraft in the same time period.

So I think this would be one area for improvement.  To shift the limits from game day, game week towards game month.  12 aircraft limit per game month rather than 3 per game week would level the playing field.

[JumboShrimp]

Jesus man, your post count is insane. heh heh   

Are you talking to me 

[JumboShrimp]

Agree completely. Especially about the long wait for a new day 1. Could also offer a bit more variation that way, too. Both in game length and start date, rather than the current 3, ~25 year game worlds spanning roughly the same years each time.

Something like this (and the reservation system) would also judge the true demand for games eras.  If most of the demand is for MT era, we might have 3 games there, while only 1 in JA and DM eras...

[Talentz]

The current used market system is a vast improvement of what we had before, and it is also an improvement as far as how much time you have to spend in front of a computer.

I swear some of those features were in direct response to me... right Sami? I know during the v1.3 test we ran before going live... I was at JFK (first time too  ) and I made soo much money that I would lease every dc-10/747 in sight. My cash flow was 3x the next biggest airline (Nemo at the time) so waiting for the market to refresh was pointless when you have 100mil to go crazy with.

Wasn't but a day or two later Sami added the max used aircraft per week hard limit.


- Talentz

Edit: Correction that was v1.2..  jeez I am getting old.

[cmdrnmartin]

Someone posted it earlier, but connecting passengers would be cool to model, although probably very hard from a programming side to model.  It's a huge crimp in operations to know that while you could do a shorter turnaround, the passengers for the plane are coming in 15 minutes later, so you need an extra thirty minutes to allow for connections...

I'm kind of saddened that people say sub 40 seat aircraft are not/barely profitable.  Most airline startups use those small planes to setup, serving small airports in Pilatus, Saabs, etc.

I'm about a week into this game now, and I can see what people mean about the difference between gamers/simmers, some of the 'big' startup airlines, dunno, just seems odd that you could startup immediately on six A320s out of KJFK.

[swiftus27]

Someone posted it earlier, but connecting passengers would be cool to model, although probably very hard from a programming side to model.  It's a huge crimp in operations to know that while you could do a shorter turnaround, the passengers for the plane are coming in 15 minutes later, so you need an extra thirty minutes to allow for connections...

I'm kind of saddened that people say sub 40 seat aircraft are not/barely profitable.  Most airline startups use those small planes to setup, serving small airports in Pilatus, Saabs, etc.

I'm about a week into this game now, and I can see what people mean about the difference between gamers/simmers, some of the 'big' startup airlines, dunno, just seems odd that you could startup immediately on six A320s out of KJFK.

Look up city based planning in the feature requests.

[swiftus27]

I swear some of those features were in direct response to me... right Sami?

Talentz... feature request here:

https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,25808.0.html