I agree with the sentiment articulated above about the pace of progress and perceived effort. After taking a siesta myself, and reflecting on the nature of the game, I've come to the following conclusions.
1. The game is stable and most of the low hanging fruit that drove progress/enhancements in the 2011-2016 era have been fixed.
2. Progress then used to be a more 'collaborative process' that incorporated player feedback more dynamically. At some point, Sami basically said that there was no need to post in the feature request section because he had built out the master plan of where he wanted AWS to go. The problem has been the lack of transparency in that roadmap and slow progress in terms of achieving those goals.
3. The core player base generally longs for the days where there was more competition - in the current iteration, it feels like nothing you can do can really cause your competitors to BK (Exaggeration I know, but that is the feeling), so you have to be content to effectively just play in your own sandbox. I know for myself, my best AWS memories are games where epic battles were fought (again mostly in the early 2010's) that resulted in feelings of accomplishment, victory, and success (or the opposite if you lost).
There have been a lot of posts about long-term players feeling frustrated and wanting to leave. I have two suggestions to help with this.
1. Transparency in the roadmap and re-engagement of players to help push the game forward.
2. Expanding ability to succeed in a variety of ways (low cost carrier vs full service, hub and spoke vs point to point, ability to invest in infrastructure/other things to improve airline's efficiency)
3. Greater impact of pricing on pax and cargo allocation as right now it's more of a set it and forget it because there's no benefit to lowering prices because total revenue declines. There's really no impact of raising prices because revenue declines. Now there's a range roughly -5% to 10% or so where tweaking prices can have a marginal benefit. And certainly if routes are way undersupplied, you can hike prices way up. But what I'm talking about is being able to charge 20% less on my 747 to get them full because a full 747 could have better economics than say a tri-star. If both are carrying 200 pax, the tri-star wins, but what if the the 747 is able to charge less and actually be more profitable because of the economics of having a larger plane. I know why the sensitivity to prices is so diminished. Because if PAX are highly sensitive to price, then it's significantly easier for larger airlines to eliminate smaller airlines because flying routes below cost. But I think that is a solvable problem and there is a balance to be had. Anyway I could go on.
Sami, I think there are a lot of people willing to help move AWS forward - just let us know what we can do to help!
Topic: Rules - rules - rules - rules - ruins (Read 524 times)
