Big airlines (Or what we called Legacy carriers) would not control95 of the airport slots i.e ORD) , would not be scheduling 788 aircraft , minutes a part, and to bot in city pairs that in relality could never support that volume of passenger traffic. I spent 30 years in the airlines , working for a Legacy US carrier. As a management team member, no airline could operate in such a matter.
Hence why i raised the point, that some sort of mechanism/control on slots , flight frequencies could be applied, so all can play in fairness, giving all a chance to enter a given air market. Not suggesting favortism, but for new players wanting to get into a city pair, no one single carrier can have more than âx%â of slots, and set with a max # of flights by city pair. I reqlize this maynot be feasible, and understand all of these are being looked into. Still enjoy the competition.
Anything thatâs merely limited by money/costs will always be a non-issue to large airlines. One of the key reasons why AS in more than 20 years never got a marketing feature: Guess who would be able to pump large sums into marketing? Large carriers, of courseâŚso a lose-lose for the game if implemented naively. The same applies to pretty much anything else.
In terms of game design, soft and/or hidden barriers that can be removed or lessened for new/small airlines in a sensible way would be a good solution. Trivial example: New airlines get a ânovelty bonusâ on image. Legacy carriers get an opposite âUnited breaks guitarsâ handicap. You get the idea. Large carriers would have to invest more to counteract those negative effects, especially if they scale with size. Extremely hard to balance, but definitely the way to go in my opinion.
Similar concepts and ideas can be applied to most parts of the game. Smaller airlines âmagicallyâ get easier/cheaper access to staff that happily stays with the company while larger ones have to pay higher wages to attract the same talent and to avoid staff fluctuation or need to do costly in-house training to maintain their workforce.
Airlines do do something close to it in real life on routes that can support such demand, like SYD-MEL, or like TYO-OSA before Shinkansen opened. But demand between airports in AS is much more than between airports in real life, and this is the reason behind the phenomenon. This cannot be solved unless demand in AS is drastically reduced to like in real life, which would make it much more difficult for player to play in the game.
And under this circumstances, rationing slots wouldnât work, as that would simply attract more different airlines into joining the market at the earliest part of the game, and new player joined much later in the game will still face the same problem.
And this part is actually realistic. In real life at airports that have extreme slot constrain, slots issues often block new competitors from joining. Therefore joining a new game world is probably a more realistic solution to the situation.
Another possibility is maybe a slot marketplace type of system, but that would probably require significant rework of the schedule system in order to allow slot be something that can be considered as asset that can be traded. And doing so wouldnât help new airlines either since slot are going to be expensive.