After learning some lessons from my first profitable airline, I’m considering starting a new one in a new world soon. I was wondering how the new ORS system is? Is it easy to run more realistic configurations of leisure and standard seats? Does price play a noticeably bigger role?
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nobody who want´s to explain a bit?
I’d be interested in hearing that as well
Amazingly quiet about that game world indeed. I’d be curious too as I’m not playing there.
I play in Yeager. And I won’t say any.
Incredibly useful post. 
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From my observations the changes have done what was expected. Seating configs are now much more dense and as such passenger throughput per slot increased. I can comfortably fly Leisure seats on a 4.000km flight from JFK to LAX and compensate with price but I don’t have to if my network is good enough. Standard seats to the Caribbean (2.500km) also no issue. I also do not stuff my aircraft with additional flight attendants and keep the onboard service reasonable.
What I tried to replicate probably compares to the average real world network carrier.
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Some more observations for those who are interested:
Two routes, ORS rating compared:
For Y class:
JFK-BOS 290km, 757, leisure seats, standard price, basic service: 35/82 score
JFK-SYR 368km, 737-9HGW, HD Slimline, 20% below standard price, basic service: 51/99 score
For C class:
JFK-BOS, recliner shorthaul, roughly 10% over standard price, basic service: 40/79 score
JFK-SYR, 737-9HGW, comfort, roughly 10% below standard price, basic service: 33/86 score
This really surprised me. I was sceptical as to how much I could make up for the “lesser seat” with price.
For Y class it seems you could build a solid airline with HD seating, as both connection rating and direct rating turn out rather well. Might have to scale down to smaller airplanes when competition increases or the game world matures overall.
For C class the case is not so clear. The space distribution on most airplanes for comfort seats is terrible, on the other hand the higher price on the recliner shorthaul flight would not really make up in rating for sacrificing a seat row in Y class. This seems to be more a case by case / airplane by airplane kind of problem. Lots of room for testing.
At this point I would like to endorse the option to configure seat type, seat pitch and width individually. I would be willing to sacrifice image points for an added seat row and add more customization options. The new ORS really endorses diversity in this regard.
Now profitability comes mostly down to how cheap you can get the aircraft. The 757 (204 seats overall) in the case above is dirt cheap (34k per week), while the 737-9 (210 seats overall) is factory new at list price. Both bring in a 20% margin on the respective flights.
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The ratings on the small seats should be no different to other servers.
It’s just the big seats that don’t get any positive ratings for big dollars.
Just checked: a HD-seat scores the same rating as a Recliner on the same route and at the same price. On old servers, you can raise the price for the latter wayway higher and still score a great rating. This is no more which is great.
Now wouldn’t this be a temp world…
I’m sure there’s going to be an outcry, but…
Can’t we install this feature on old servers? I run a huge airline with 1300+ aircrafts, but as I think it makes the game much more interesting and probably more competitive, I accept the changes. So should every other player who really wants to play and manage his airline.
I’m torn about this.
Some of my airlines simply couldn’t exist in such setup. Others easily could but would crush quite a few small competitors when tripling the capacity in just a few days.
It has to be rolled out to.old worlds. Its what the game needs. In real world airlines have to adapt to changes in pax behaviour. 30 years ago LCCs were barely a thing. I love this game but that is the only issue i have is everyone runs really low configs.
Probably a bizarre idea, but what about a gradual change of the configuration? Change the parameters slowly over a couple of months. Gives time to react as sudden change would cause total mayhem.
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You would still need to practically change (downgrade) all fleets… unless you sudenly want to have double capacity at all servers (and those who would survive double capacity would be holdings with tens of billions in the bank). It would take several years to completely change fleets of airlines with thousands of aircraft. It would also create slot issue when replacing 739s on TATL for larger aircraft as 739s would probably be not economical any more, or for smaller jets such as CR7/9 or E70/90 downgrading to props… In any case the gradual phase would take years to complete.
And I don’t think any long term AS player is willing to invest years of time and credits to just replace their fleets that were based on ORS that was like this since forever (value ratio based). That would mean no new routes, no new strategy, no new partnerships, just keep replacing aircraft like a robot, click, click, click… Would anyone pay credits and spend their time just on that?
You will not see JREwing, Kahael, Frank1966, Ufsatp, Sire-Mike, kinibert06, Ah123, Metha, ahmedbeg, afgeneral, iammyself, albac1, Unbr0se, Boeing777, Panache, cecco2911, ContWings, bhutch, Martin1984, DC10-30, Boeing777, endgreen, bookhat, RichS, Netsrot258, JustPlaneBad, ts310, andynrw, au_di, sading2, fentlfan, mickkey95, ferofero1, me, saying that they look forward to years of numbing and boring fleet replacements.
If you look on profiles of those proposing it, they are players with small airlines who change servers frequently and cannot stick to a particular server or airline for long. Something they think would help them to be more successful, yet it would do complete opposite. They would still face 99 ORS ratings from the “kraken” and in addition to that they would compete against overcapacity. Nowadays if they have some experience they can make airline work against “kraken” just because of the way ORS is functioning. They can make some money and grow just because of the way ORS is based on value-ratio. Take that away and you have no way to compete on old servers against those “awful kraken”.
There are two kinds of players who come to old servers: those who learned how to make airlines work with current ORS and those who don’t have a clue. Those that don’t have a clue would not be better off, see reasons above. Those that have a clue would no longer be able to set up on old server and slowly make their way in. At the end, nobody would be better off.
And here comes another thing: this year, AS has taken away the tool that helped new players come to old servers (yes, those hated-by-minority 10% leases). Those allowed new players come, compete against other alliances, get cheap leases and importantly get mentoring along the way. In our alliance we have helped many who had no or little clue. And great part of those players are now successfully playing also on other servers, increasing credits revenue for AS.
Unfortunately, AS is step by step abandoning the very game that brought them to online gaming industry. By our calculations (those who ran the numbers) AS revenue is not much higher now than it was last year (excluding the December revenue outlier because of discounted credits wheree everyone stocked up for half a year ~ 2 years – yes I know people who bought credits for 2 years to offset price increase). That was the first step to reduce paying customers on old servers - many players with multiple holdings liquidated their secondary and tertiary holdings, and I bet it was not new players who took up their space, but rather the existing competition. Bring in the second step - complete inability to start up on old servers because you can’t make money competing against “bad kraken” with this “modified ORS” even having clue and all the knowledge, and the old servers will die in slow and agonizing death.
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The problem is that micromanagement is not fun in this game. Once you have an airline with 1000 planes, it is set in stone, and most people won’t have patience to make any big changes.
Build an airline and forget.
I am not so sure you can generalise like this. In my case, I started on a lot of old servers and had airlines of varying sizes.
The single reason I always shut them down was because of boredom and predictability. After the slow but fun grind in the beginning, when the hub was established, I knew exactly what was coming.
I knew I needed to keep flying those 100 seat A320s, I knew getting passengers would never be an issue and I knew this game does not manage to endorse any sort of competition.
Ultimately I knew the endgame was only ever going to be about slots.
Why can an airline just interline with 100s of other airlines and have no exponential cost penalty (infinite passengers)? Why do passengers proportionately prefer a connection over a direct flight (infinite passengers)? Why would passengers pay up to 200% premium over standard for better seats → ultra low density cabins → artificial too little capacity and too much demand (infinite passengers).
All these things can be balanced with the current system. No need to re-invent the wheel or throw huge amounts of man hours at this.
Yes and no. Can be balanced on brand new server as is the case going on now. Doing it on an existing server would cause what I wrote and there is no need to repeat it again.
And in the future (a year from now) once Xiguan (with this modified ORS) becomes “old world” with couple of thousand-aircraft-big airlines, it will also be very difficult to start a new airline there and compete against the “big bad kraken”. For those players “without clue” it will be impossible, and for those who have “mastered AS” it will be extremely difficult. Honestly, anyone who knows a bit about AS and is with his senses must admit that the only way to compete against “big bad kraken” is to make at least some money during crucial startup phase of first few months (using premium config and juicy price markups so even 50% full plane is possibly breaking even) untill you reach a critical mass which will allow your own transfer pax to flow through your network and sustain you. Add to that the fact that servers from Riem onward have different ticket pricing favoring long haul vs short haul (and where do all new players start - it’s short haul) where it is much more difficult to turn flight profitable with current system, so add the new ORS, new pricing, massive capacity, big bad kraken, and you have a formula for … a dying old gameworld
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Indeed. But the steady-state endgame equilibrium isn’t a ton of fun either.
That’s correct. I still have a huge list of the features the now-defunct development aid team proposed to AS, which would have made the game more fun. Basically, none of those got implemented. The problem is, as one other player mentioned in other thread, AS had been abandoned and all interest and attention is on PU game.
All of this “adjusted ORS” and stuff is just basically a patch throwing on a very bumpy pothole filled road. It’s just keeping the road “passable” for as long as possible, but there is no long term road engineering project in place to amplify, improve, and modernize the road, do some improvement of foundations, new asphalt cover, a new rest area and a roadside motel, a new gas station and dedicated truck-only lanes would also be nice. However, the investor does not consider infrastructure industry (roads) rentable any more, collection of tolls is not on the level the investor considers to be excellent revenue, and therefore has decided to concentrate attention and invest money in commercial real estate. Having had the tolls increased by the investor, the road will keep to be quick-patched ocassionally for the time being, for as long as the level of passing traffic on the road and corresponding tolls collected afford it.
This game is still the best airline management game in the world, and I can stand by that. I know the low density seating is a little unrealistic, but there is still nothing better out there.
Rubioh I appreicate the frustration, but posts like that will have the opposite effect to what you want. Human nature, why try and make a game better when its players are already fed up…