Changes to rules, slot transfers (to discuss)

[ucfknightryan]

I liked your post very much.

Now, If city-based demand would come in a short amount of time, I'd agree with attacking the cause, but basing in the fact that city based demand has been on "development" since 4 years now (according what I read in the forums and you just sayed), I'm gonna go with let's attack the symptoms.

Terminals would be a very nice option to auction systems.

If attacking the symptoms involves something other than rebalancing the game around the problems at maybe 6-8 seriously slot limited airports (of which maybe 5-6 are ones people actually care about) at the expense of the rest great.  I think terminals are a great idea.  I think hard quotas are absolutely stupid.  An airport like DFW is never going to be run out of slots by a single airline.  Making the airlines at airports like that sit there board out of their skulls doing nothing to fix an issue at a small number of airports is stupid

[dmoose42]

Yeah, I'm still gonna go with the first option...

Nice.  Continue the attacks.  You are good at that.  

If you notice, I'm doing ok at ORD in GW4 at a base that is not slot-restricted.  It's about building an airline that is successful - slot restrictions or not.

But this is off-point.  Limiting how many slots a player can get in a single game day will still benefit those players that have more ready access to a computer or have the inclination to check in more frequently.  

[ucfknightryan]

-----------------

what, like you didn't delete your huge anti-elite rant at the beginning of the thread like sami told you to?  Also how is it any more off topic then you posting that you don't believe that dmoose gets his slots because he can check periodically thru the day at work?

[ezzeqiel]

Nice.  Continue the attacks.  You are good at that.  

It's not an attack dude.. I honestly think you did hire some people in order to press F5 all day and grab that insanely amount of LHR slots... Anyway, your friend westjetinc already said there's nothing wrong on that, so relax dude, it's not an attack if there's nothing wrong involved, right ?

what, like you didn't delete your huge anti-elite rant at the beginning of the thread like sami told you to?  Also how is it any more off topic then you posting that you don't believe that dmoose gets his slots because he can check periodically thru the day at work?

I censored it, as requested by sami. If you read "ELITE" out of "E***E", that's your own problem dude...


Also, I did not went off topic; my post was well into topic with just one line of it dedicated to someone that's not even you.
Your post was entirely off topic just to answer me.



BACK TO TOPIC:

I also think hard quotas is a terrible idea. I suggested auctions (both monetary speaking and not monetary ones)

I suggested terminals, the last one being in the thread I opened to suggest ideas to an "experimental" world, so I'd really like to see them implemented.


City based demand, free market slot system/terminals, etc would make AWS the best game of its kind; that's why I always mention it, and that's why I helped with my own country data when sami asked for it.

[dmoose42]

If the real issue at hand (refer to Sami's original post) is that certain airlines have been engaged in slot swapping activities.  As Sami stated this is not something he wants to encourage and will penalize if it occurs above a certain threshold.  I think a big part of the challenge is the inconsistency in which penalties are applied and the difficulty in observing when the deviant behavior has occurred.  The temporary fixes to the slot system that are proposed will not change the fact that airlines can still trade slots by synchonzing pickup and delivery.  Certain airlines may have a vendetta against other airlines, but limiting how many slots an airline can grab in a drop will encourage more teamwork and more slot trading as alliance member look to help out their mates.

I know jetwestinc and saftrutch will always be mad about certain slot trading activites and certain other airlines will make up conspiracies about how certain alliances always cheat.  Other airlines will spend their time making lists about airlines to avoid.  Some airlines foster teamwork while others give self-destructive advice.  The game is about competition.  Honestly I love it when [SC] King Kong says "I'm surprised every time that people are affraid of competition. Honestly said, I love it! A strong competitor is what brings a game element in my game and makes me wanna play AWS all day (if I had ever time for that)." Even if he's in another alliance and even if he may demolish an airline in my alliance, I LOVE THE SPIRIT!

[dmoose42]

It's not an attack dude.. I honestly think you did hire some people in order to press F5 all day and grab that insanely amount of LHR slots... Anyway, your friend westjetinc already said there's nothing wrong on that, so relax dude, it's not an attack if there's nothing wrong involved, right ?

I censored it, as requested by sami. If you read "ELITE" out of "E***E", that's your own problem dude...

Too funny.  I'm glad you don't take yourself too seriously.  I'm sorry that you are bitter.  Cheers.

[tcrlaf]

Gate pushes? Oh. I assumed when speaking of airport slots both in the real world and within AWS that we were talking about runway departures (the amount of takeoffs and landings any one particular runway can handle AKA Takeoff and Landing Slots). Had no idea it meant the actual time the plane gets pushed back. Wouldn't that be called Gate Slots? From what I have learnt from my years at Heathrow is planes leave their gates/ramps to get to the runway at their allocated slot times. Hence why some times are much more expensive than others and when a plane is late to the runway or simply misses their departure slot, they are made to wait for planes behind them to takeoff first in order not to cause a knock on delay effect.

And what exactly are you saying "exactly" too?  tcrlaf said within 5 minutes, 10 heavies takeoff from 4:10AM over his head. He didn't say anything about when they leave their gates.

In the U.S., pushback into the alley is generally first-come, first served, with releases confirmed by the tower, on the roll. It isn't unusual for an aircraft to wait at the end of the runway for a release to LGA, ATL, etc, or to pull out of line if that release is delayed/changed. 30 minutes from "out" to "off isn't anything out of the norm, for some destinations, especially for slotting over the Atlantic Corridor, or busy airports.

Departure time is pushback, with everything else built in to the schedule, which is what I assume Sami models(?)..

Wheels up/off times can be a whole different animal.

[tcrlaf]

Speaking of the Atlantic Corridor/ North Atlantic Tracks, if you really wanted to complicate things, put an hourly limit on the number of aircraft allowed to fly the pond between Europe/North America, simulating Oceanic Center constraints. That will certainly reduce demand for slots at LHR! 

[ucfknightryan]

It's not an attack dude.. I honestly think you did hire some people in order to press F5 all day and grab that insanely amount of LHR slots... Anyway, your friend westjetinc already said there's nothing wrong on that, so relax dude, it's not an attack if there's nothing wrong involved, right ?

And if you think anyone is hiring someone to hit F5 all day to help them grab slots I stand by my last post, you're delusional.

I censored it, as requested by sami. If you read "ELITE" out of "E***E", that's your own problem dude...


Also, I did not went off topic; my post was well into topic with just one line of it dedicated to someone that's not even you.
Your post was entirely off topic just to answer me.

If you honestly think what sami said in that post referred to the name of the alliance and not the whole rant about an alliance than either you're an idiot or your reading comprehension sucks.

BACK TO TOPIC:

I also think hard quotas is a terrible idea. I suggested auctions (both monetary speaking and not monetary ones)

I suggested terminals, the last one being in the thread I opened to suggest ideas to an "experimental" world, so I'd really like to see them implemented.


City based demand, free market slot system/terminals, etc would make AWS the best game of its kind; that's why I always mention it, and that's why I helped with my own country data when sami asked for it.

I don't see how any auction system monetary or otherwise will help the situation at any of these airports.  If it's monetary than the big long haul airlines will drive the price up to the point that no one else can afford them, because (esp at LHR and Haneda) they are basically licenses to print money.  There is no cost too high that wouldn't prevent any airport from starting there in the first place, so why not just ban airlines from starting there and be done with it.  If not monetary it still favors the big airlines as they can more easily absorb the costs of inefficient operations forced on them by winning slots scattered all over the place.  And if when there are insufficient slots they are divided on a first come first serve basis than the same airlines that manage to get the slots first now are going to get their bids in first then.

Terminals and city based demand are the real solutions and I'm all for them.

[ezzeqiel]

And if you think anyone is hiring someone to hit F5 all day to help them grab slots I stand by my last post, you're delusional.

Is either that, or some kind of alliance manipulation on slots. Pick the one you like the most. (anyway, one of your teammates already confirmed this several posts ago, so this discussion is already irrelevant).

Terminals and city based demand are the real solutions and I'm all for them.

I agree on this, but I think city based demand will not arrive in the short term, so sami's idea might be to put temporary patches on the situation until those solutions arrive.


I don't think auctions as the best system, but I think them as a good patch until major upgrades are made.

[TimmyTopper]

Auctions would be a stupid idea if monetary based, simply put the biggest airlines would be able to outbid everyone else. Dynamic airport growth and/or terminals seems like the best solution to me. Until then a loose cap at congested airports on the amount of slots that can be grabbed at once seems like the simplest solution. This would at least stop one player grabbing all the slots at once.

[Infinity]

I don't get what you are all babbling about. We don't need any short term solution that only creates new problems, we need a good long term solution and, until then, a fair and predictable enforcement of the rules.

[dmoose42]

Watch it or you will be banned...

I agree.  I think we should be devoting our energies to terminals, cargo, and city-based demand (and fixing the pricing capabilities)...

I am happy to help build out a wireframe of how the terminal functionality would work it you're interested sami...

[Sanabas]

There are always going to be some people willing to cheat. Whether by using fake routes to get slots, holding slots for someone else, gifting slots, holding planes, transferring cash to their friend. As long as they're reasonably smart about it, don't make it really obvious, they'll get away with it. Some people might notice the cheating, but they won't be able to do anything about it. Other than gifting cash to another airline, all of the most-used cheats, right back to auto-diallers for the UM, all of the frustrations, come back to the same issue.

That issue is that used planes, new planes, slots, they're all allocated on a first come, first served basis. They're all limited resources, so there is a huge competitive advantage to be had in getting more of them, a huge advantage to be had by being lucky enough to be online at the right time, the risk/reward of cheating to get them means we end up with plenty of cheating. It also means we end up with false positives. There's no way to tell the difference between prior planning to transfer a group of slots, and your friend getting the group of slots simply because they knew you were quitting and paid attention.

I'm another one who thinks meaningful competition is what makes the game interesting. But it's not something that can be had in most airports. You don't beat your competition by being more efficient, by building a better airline. You beat your competition by being better at getting planes from the UM, by being better at getting hold of slots. You should not beat your competition because you happened to be online at the right time, because you have friends grabbing assets for you.

The solution is to stop it being first come, first served, come up with something fairer, tilt the balance from luck & timing towards skill & efficiency. That applies to new planes, used planes, and slots.

Since this thread is about slots:

I don't think a hard quota is all that useful. If you end up the sole survivor in your airport, why should you be stopped from expanding to fill it? And I think the problem is in the acquisition process, rather than the end total. But a hard distinction between HQ slots and arrival slots could be useful. Just to pull a number out of the air, say there are 15 slots/hr that can only be used by airlines based in that airport, 6/hr for outside airlines. Might take some balancing, might be different %s for different airports, but would certainly stop outside airlines grabbing slots for later donation to their friend HQed there. And would work with my other suggestion...

An auction is going to favour the bigger airlines, it's complicated, it'll also make logistics harder for the user, particularly if the 14 day limit for using new slots remains in place. Would hate to spend money to win an auction, and then lose the slots because you weren't online as the auction ended.

I think a soft quota, slots being allocated to airlines upon release, would be the way to go, if the programming was feasible. Say on day 1 of the world, LHR would normally have ~20 slots/hr. And ATL would have 40. So, on day 1, for airlines outside those airports, there'd be say 5/hr & 12/hr available. Every airline that starts up in LHR would get 3/hr, in ATL 5/hr. Could have fixed, known dates each year for reallocating slots. So after 6 months, if 2 of the airlines have only used 1 slot/hr, 1 has BKed, and LHR has been given an additional 2 slots, then that's 9 slots/hr allocated to the airlines again. 2/hr for visitors, 1.4/hr for each HQed, so it'd be 1/hr for everyone, then extra 06xx & 11xx for airline a, 07xx & 12xx for airline b, etc. With all slots still needing to be paid for the way they are now. If you keep expanding enough to use every single one of your allocations each time, then you'll be on a level footing with the competition who has done the same. If you're inefficient, don't expand, you'll lose allocations & fall behind.

Could also build in some sort of request mechanism, ask for specific slots in the next round of allocations. (Which would also work very well for the UM, btw, giving both fairer access to popular models, and quicker access to less popular models with small numbers in storage, making them more feasible to use. But that's a different thread)

Might take some tweaking, but would be fair, and the competition would come back to who can use their resources the best, instead of who can grab them the fastest/who can be online at the right time. It would make it easier to plan ahead as an airline, you'll have a rough idea of future slot availability, making it easier to plan plane purchases. You'd know when to come and check to see if you got more/less than expected, you'd have a couple of RL days to react. You wouldn't need to be online regularly, hoping to be there at the right time, and then frantically gobbling up as much as you could.

Of course, somewhere like LHR, you won't be able to BK a competitor with this. But somewhere like LHR, you can't BK a competitor now. It's the easiest airport in the entire world to start on day 1 and build something profitable. All you can do now is hope they get bored & go away. All you can do now is grab more slots than them, guaranteeing you'll always be the biggest airline there. But with this sort of change, being & staying the biggest will actually be an achievement, actually be a challenge, not become a foregone conclusion 5 years in to a 50 year world.

[LemonButt]

I don't get what you are all babbling about. We don't need any short term solution that only creates new problems, we need a good long term solution and, until then, a fair and predictable enforcement of the rules.

Unfortunately, saftfrucht is right.  A super simple solution would be to create a cap on slots for all players that can only be increased through paying a fee to increase your cap, effectively throttling the slot hoarding.

However, many airlines (myself included) have 10s, if not 100s of aircraft on order and limiting slots acquisition wouldn't be fair as there would be many bagholders (and likely BKs).  Any changes would certainly have to be in new game worlds because existing game worlds are just too mature to implement something like this.

[Sami]

Okay, thanks for the input everyone. Decision on this matter is as follows:

System will automatically monitor any major slot releases made by players. So when a player bankrupts (by player action, not by bank), closes a base or closes routes at a slot restricted airport the data about his old slots is stored. For all other players after this action the purchase of new slots at this airport is restricted to an amount equalling 30% of the amount of slots released or 35 individual slots (which ever is higher) per each 5 game days. Restriction is valid for 14 days after the slots were closed, and after that there are no limits again.

System is in force only at airports that have less than 30% of the overall slots left and that are otherwise big enough. In GW#3 for example these airports are currently: DAAG, EDDF, EGKK, EGLL, EHAM, HECA, KJFK, KLAS, LEBL, LFPG, LTBA, RJTT, YSSY, ZBAA (just a snapshot of today's stats, this is not a hard-coded list).

If airport's capacity increases and new slots become available that way there are no restrictions (and any previous restrictions still valid are also cleared, technical reason). There are also some other thresholds involved here so for example closing just one route and releasing 7 slots at LHR does not trigger any restrictions for purchases to anyone, and so on. = It needs a large amount of slots to become available at once (= during a period of a couple days) to activate.

But to sum it up, the idea is that when a player voluntarily withdraws from an airport, his slots will be more accessible to many players and they cannot be grabbed by a single player. Of course if nobody else wants them, the single player can get them but it takes a bit more time now. And it should not also restrict players that much since 35 new slots per 5 days is enough for everyone and in case of a large airline bankruptcy of let's say 2000 slots the "fastest" airline can still get 600 of those max.

If some one wishes to transfer slots, the system cannot prevent that if it's done in small scale but any large transfers of hundreds of slots in a matter of few game days is now impossible (or it takes a very long time now when it has to be done bit by bit). And in case of bankruptcies there's now a better chance for everyone to get something ..

(data is already being collected, purchase limits will be activated some time next week)

[Jackson]

Slots are stealthily released on a random schedule because when they were on a predictable schedule they would all be gone in less than 30 seconds after a drop to the people with the lowest latency connections to the server, as everyone in the game was sitting there with preplanned routes waiting for the instant slots would drop to rapidly switch tabs hitting create route.  As bad as the issues are now they pale in comparison to the slot situation back then.

Oh. Ok. Didn't know it had already been tested/ a function before. I see your point. Well Terminals and the two features some propose are excellent functions to help solve this problem.

[Jackson]

In the U.S., pushback into the alley is generally first-come, first served, with releases confirmed by the tower, on the roll. It isn't unusual for an aircraft to wait at the end of the runway for a release to LGA, ATL, etc, or to pull out of line if that release is delayed/changed. 30 minutes from "out" to "off isn't anything out of the norm, for some destinations, especially for slotting over the Atlantic Corridor, or busy airports.

Departure time is pushback, with everything else built in to the schedule, which is what I assume Sami models(?)..

Wheels up/off times can be a whole different animal.

Ok. But what about JFK? (Is that 1st cime 1st serve?) Despite having four runways just like ATL, they are crosswind so even though I think it's possible to use two for takeoff and two for landing, the proffessionals think otherwise so just like LHR, only one per takeoff and one per landing at any given time. JFK tends to have longer queues than LHR sometimes aswel. It took 40 minutes for my BA flight to taxi from the gates to the runway. Surely a 40min delay was accounted for because it is a regular occurrence there and Im assuming most flights would be delayed if they didn't factor in taxi time. I can see how slot times may be a bit vague there and less strict.

In Manchester Airport it is first come first serve. It isn't a busy airport. Gatwick, they are way more strict and I have witnessed planes waiting at the runway threshold while 1, 2 or 3 planes come from behind and get airborne before the aircraft that was waiting. And that is a regular sight there. When they takeoff to the west I should say. Not 8R.

Same at LHR. Some planes are very close to the runway but end up staying put for 5 to 15 minutes while a bunch of olanes overtake. I believe in those cases they are either early or late although ATC at LHR do do favours for some airlines.

[DavidBurnie]

You are conflating game play and economic arguments.  Slot hoarding is inherently anti-competitive, as it excludes competitors from the market.  A capitalist system seeks to have a free market.  Very few schools of economic thought believe that monopoly is beneficial to the capitalist economy.

Arguing that players who put in the time and effort should get the slots, and that the slot quota system would punish them is a perfectly valid argument.  But it is a game play argument, not an economic one.

The issue here is we are simulating a business not a government. It's not my job to make sure you have a fair share of the slots at my base. It's my job to choke the life out of you so that you BK and then I can jack up the fares on my own flights and bank the profit. Why should I give a solitary damn about how easy it is for anyone to compete with me? If that's not your idea of fun why are you playing a business simulation, especially of one simulating one of the most cutthroat industries in the world? Economists may not think a monopoly is good, but as a CEO I'd love a monopoly on my base. I think the problem here is people are more interested in simming a sandbox of the aviation industry than what it really is. So you can't fly to LHR, BFD - out of 2000 or so airlines in the real world, 90 get to fly there.

[mavi]

The issue here is we are simulating a business not a government. It's not my job to make sure you have a fair share of the slots at my base. It's my job to choke the life out of you so that you BK and then I can jack up the fares on my own flights and bank the profit. Why should I give a solitary damn about how easy it is for anyone to compete with me? If that's not your idea of fun why are you playing a business simulation, especially of one simulating one of the most cutthroat industries in the world? Economists may not think a monopoly is good, but as a CEO I'd love a monopoly on my base. I think the problem here is people are more interested in simming a sandbox of the aviation industry than what it really is. So you can't fly to LHR, BFD - out of 2000 or so airlines in the real world, 90 get to fly there.

Not sure why your attacking me.  I have no problem with your point of view.  What I have a problem with is people saying you can't do X because its socialism.

What we should be focused on here is what makes airwaysim a better game, not on whether a particular rule coincides with one's chosen economic theory.