I'm a really new player to AS and here's a small thing I would love to have implemented.
An app or the like that can be downloaded to a computer (to save server space), which was just an excel document of flight history (total seats booked etc), finances (daily revenue), passengers transported each day and other useful information would be a great addition to the management side of the sim!
It would be simple, as it is just updating sheets in an Excel file, and each "package" would be only a few kilobytes max - meaning that not much server space would be required each day
Well. Meaning that the people with skills in development or specifically artificial intelligence (like me) would have yet another tool to bias competition with the other players.
I agree this would be incredibly useful. But as I would like to play as much as possible with equal weapons with the other players, I don't think giving that kind of data would add anything to the game. On the contrary, it could potentially remove some "fun" for the other players in front, reducing the game to a competition of "who got the best programming skills".
Clearly, I'm not sure this would be a good and relevant thing to add.
Should some other metrics and analytics tools could be useful to get insight on how the airline is going, I sincerely believe these should be implemented in-game and made available to anyone rather than developed merely for one's own benefit. Yet, developing such tools in-game takes time, so the current situation seems perfectly fine to me.
However, I would strongly support opening the public data (from the database) in a computer-readable format, that would allow to develop open tools for everyone to use – for example finding the best airport to start.
There is a 3rd party tool that has been officially approved and that provides many users insights and competitive analytics. That tool is called AS Route Maps.
It's already possible to go to Load Monitoring, Select All, Copy, then process the result with a script ... I have a database of every flight booked over the last three months. So why not make this sort of thing available to people less OCD and with fewer programming skillz than me? :-D
I've been copying my finances at roughly 23:59 every day since I started. It'd be great if it would do it automatically, meaning I don't need to stay up late if I want to know how much money my airline's made in the past 24 hours! :P
I'd love to do all that, but I think it's too much stuff to do for it not to be copied automatically. I mean - it'd be bloody awesome to see the number of people connecting to each flight, changes over weeks with rising and falling competition, and the like.
Again - real airlines record this data, so why shouldn't we be able to?!
I don't mean anything related to code. I literally just mean that, whenever a flight is completed, it downloads all of the details, like the load and transfer statistics, finances and the like. All the work you'd normally do would still be required, but this would be an excellent planning tool. One thing is opening up a new route and seeing flights gradually fill up, but seeing those flights fill up differently when you open new routes and change seating etc is a whole new aspect!
About removing "fun", I never meant for it to be compulsory or a requirement, just as an optional addition to those who want to have a record of their airline, daily profit margins, weekly leasing/depreciation costs etc.
Basically all I am asking for is an analytics tool, that simply records information that the game already gives you. So, it's not changing the gameplay in any way aside from the fact that once the flight history is overwritten, or you want to see your income from a month ago, it's not vanished from the face of the earth!