[-] Airline age and Route ASK not in Airline Score

[Delta]

According to this link https://www.airwaysim.com/forum/index.php/topic,26356.msg322074.html#msg322074, quoting Sami:

The score is calculated based on the basic statistics, and it includes the following values: Pre-tax profit, Operating revenue, Profit margin, Airline image, Transported pax (since start), Airline age, Credit rating, Fleet size, Fleet utilization, Fleet age, Fleet condition, Fuel burn per passenger, Route ASK, Route RPK, Route LF, Punctuality, Number of weekly flights, Number of airports served. These stats have been chosen since they represent a broad selection of all the possible stats, but leaving out some stats that are duplicates (like pax YTD / pax all-time) or could be easily manipulated in the short term (number of staff for example).

My thoughts:

1/ Airline age should not be taken into consideration. Think about this: two airlines with the same statistics except age. The younger one one should (IMHO) rank higher than the oldest since it took it less time to achieve this, meaning it has actually performed better.

2/ Route ASK should also not be included. This stat is a duplicate of Route RPK + Route LF.

3/ Transported pax (since start) (=included) and Transported pax (Year-To-Date) (=not included) : pax YTD is not a duplicate since the two stats together bear progression/improvement of an airline's performances, which they do not if taken alone. Not sure if that's clear but my own conclusion is that Pax YTD should be included. Open to debate.

Your thoughts?

[freshmore]

1) I disagree, running an airline successfully a long time take a lot of careful planning and work. You navigate some tough times, like high fuel prices in the 70's and the aftermath of 9/11. An older airline may have taken longer to get there because initially demand is lower, aircraft are smaller and slower etc. What the score is, is some sort of assessment of the airlines at that time, as well as over time. I think someone who has kept an airline running longer deserves some recognition in the score, because it's not easy to have consistent success. Given the amount of bankruptcies in a game, which must run into 1000's. It doesn't take long to rise up the oldest airline list as a newer airline.

2) Disagree, ASK is a measure of sheer capacity, RPK is a measure of sales volume and LF is a measure of efficiency of converting capacity into sales. They are similar but each is a different airline metric measure, at least that's how I see them.

3) I can see this. Pax since start rewards consistent success of an airline, but I would suggest Pax (Previous), which reward more recent success as well as consistent success which helps balance the score better for newer airlines that are having great success.

[Delta]

1) I disagree, running an airline successfully a long time take a lot of careful planning and work. You navigate some tough times, like high fuel prices in the 70's and the aftermath of 9/11. An older airline may have taken longer to get there because initially demand is lower, aircraft are smaller and slower etc. What the score is, is some sort of assessment of the airlines at that time, as well as over time. I think someone who has kept an airline running longer deserves some recognition in the score, because it's not easy to have consistent success. Given the amount of bankruptcies in a game, which must run into 1000's. It doesn't take long to rise up the oldest airline list as a newer airline.

I see your point, but I have to respectfully disagree. Imagine you have an airline established the second day into a Game World.
After 50 years of successful operations, if there remains 300 airlines established the first day then this one airline will rank 301st and get much less points than the 300 first ones.
Now an airline established 40 years into this same Game World may rank 400th, much closer to the 301st than the latter to the first rank, despite a difference in age of 40 years vs. 1 day.
Imaginary numbers, but the possibility of this happening is quite unfair I would say.

2) Disagree, ASK is a measure of sheer capacity, RPK is a measure of sales volume and LF is a measure of efficiency of converting capacity into sales. They are similar but each is a different airline metric measure, at least that's how I see them.

Yes, but there's no reason to reward an airline with huge capacity if it can't sell it.

[freshmore]

I see your point, but I have to respectfully disagree. Imagine you have an airline established the second day into a Game World.
After 50 years of successful operations, if there remains 300 airlines established the first day then this one airline will rank 301st and get much less points than the 300 first ones.
Now an airline established 40 years into this same Game World may rank 400th, much closer to the 301st than the latter to the first rank, despite a difference in age of 40 years vs. 1 day.
Imaginary numbers, but the possibility of this happening is quite unfair I would say.

Yes, but there's no reason to reward an airline with huge capacity if it can't sell it.

True, that is a risk. However, if you can keep an airline running, even from a day 2 start so many of the initial day 1 airlines will go bankrupt, often quite quickly. That gap reduces. Last GW2, only 57 day one airlines survived and last GW3 was 49. So a day two airline will only be different by a much smaller amount of points. It also possible to end up quite highly placed joining a Gameworld late, because so many go bankrupt. If you can keep going to Game end and do your best in other areas, it's very possible to place high in score terms.

I think it's important that as a game simulating airlines over a period of 70 or 80 years that we reward long term players in a world, balancing that against newer airlines is also important.

Yeah, sort of. A large airline will have a high capacity slightly less load factor. In my experience, an airline operating smaller planes has less ASK but tends to have find it easier to have a high load factor. So having ASK or RPK and LF to an extent makes sense. However I wouldn't say they are duplicates of each. If you were to take either ASK or RPK out of the equation, replacing it with CASK (Cost per Available seat km) would a good statistic to have. A lower operating costs gives a higher placing, although that would potentially punish geographical differences in wages quite considerably, so I can see why that might not be included.

[qunow]

I believe airline score is calculated based on percentage of top score instead of rank. So if a gameworld operated for 40 years = 14600 days, airlines started at day 2 would still be able to get 14599/14600=more than 99.993% of the max score.

[freshmore]

If you read the link at the top of the topic. Max points is number of airlines, lowest rank airline gets 1 point. So 100 airlines, top one gets 100 points, last one gets 1 and everyone else gets points equal to their rank. So in terms of age, newest airline gets 1 point, but that will increase as new airlines join behind you, as well as when airlines older than you bankrupt. If you can keep running it's very easy to over time to climb that list to rank quite highly, even with late joining of a game.

[Sami]

I do not see the benefit of making changes. Of the three suggestions the pax ytd is the only possible/reasonable addition, and it does not make difference in the big picture really.