I have survived many patches and I made a lot of bad experiences with the patches in AS. For years the team was telling us that because of the test servers, big changes do not happen anymore. So I was eager to see what happens with this patch and pretty open, especially as it has been said that we can still use our old cabin configurations.
However, one first glance and I'm disappointed again. From all old configurations, the F/A's were removed except the minimum F/A's required. So I now have 12'276 "unused" F/A's and the ratings of my cabin configurations are much worse.
Why did this happen? Why was there not any announcement with this regard? And why did you guys keep on telling us we could still use the old configurations? It's simply not true!
It's just another nuisance and within seconds, an open-minded player turns into a disappointed customer again... honestly - this sucks!
EDIT: Nice to see, that the seat pitch on the old configurations turns from 5 green to 5 red. Oh yes, we can still use the old configurations...
The "removal" of the F/As has technical reasons and will remain. Same goes for the seat pitch, as it is calculated very differently from the old model. We could and should have communicated more clearly that this would happen, but during our many weeks of testing, no one ever complained about it, which was pure coincidence.
Here's a few things to note:
The problem affects all players in the same way.
F/As can of course be re-used as soon as you have switched to new cabin configurations.
The F/A rating is not the most important one and you should be fine while you take your time experimenting with new configuration until you go for a full-scale replacement of your old cabins.
Although we designed the transition in a way that doe not force players to take immediate action (as in: the same day or very shortly after the patch), the assumption was and still is that players will replace their cabin configurations eventually over a course of a few weeks.
Remember that you can remove legacy configs from your airplanes with the value being refunded and that bulk-actions in fleet management should make replacements of cabin configs comparably painless and swift.
Patches of this kind are and always will be a part of AirlineSim as long as we have persistent game worlds without resets. We have to roll out all major features like the new cabin editor on all servers, causing certain disturbances among existing airlines. I can only ask for your understanding in this matter, but cannot change its nature.
I have to agree this was completely avoidable, and you should apologise after saying that the old configurations would still be on the run without any catch ( at least that's why I understood, and I guess I'm not alone...).
And I truly disagree when you say it affects players th same way, because it only affects carriers that were offering a premium service like my own.
I’m truly pleased with the new features, but I wish the process could’ve been a bit different…
So for me the question that follows is how can I change the seating configuration of my aircrafts to new ones, without having to pay? I would really appreciate a goood answer on this, specially form the team ;)
The "removal" of the F/As has technical reasons and will remain. Same goes for the seat pitch, as it is calculated very differently from the old model. We could and should have communicated more clearly that this would happen, but during our many weeks of testing, no one ever complained about it, which was pure coincidence.
…
Please take no offense, but what kind of "testing" is it when the utmost obvious things remain uncaught?
Nobody really found it strange to have the same rating for one seat type regardless of the cabin layout? It makes a huge difference to have either a 3+3 or a 2+2+2 layout. Not so in game apparently.
The "one seat fits all" setup as it was until today was just fine for each type of aircraft. Now I have 16 different seats that either fit your cabin good or not. The new seats are great for standard-narrowbodies (737/A320), but which seat to chose for an Airbus standard-widebody?
Personally, I like the new seating config. Sure, some money has to be spent to upgrade the seating, but in the end you have more control. And, to make this more painless, all old seating configs are refunded... so all our airlines are paying for is the difference.
Additionally, with all of the crying about not being able to manage flight attendants after a seating config is created... this new patch solves the problem. I think curveballs like this help increase competition in AS as the changes are across the board. Those who can adapt the best get the most success. Adaptation is key.
In my opinion this patch makes no sense. If the users haven’t possibility to change the access number in a row, then only create comfort access by pitch using for business and first class will not possible. For create a normal configuration needs the option, which to set the number of seats in the row. For example, for a business class 4 seats/row, for the first 2 s/r. Much more useful would be using http://www.seatguru.com and create several REAL standard cabin config for most common aircraft types.
Yes, they are, but since the new seats are more expensive I ended up paying 1M for having basically the same configuration. For that reason, my suggestion was to keep the update free just for the first time.
F/As can of course be re-used as soon as you have switched to new cabin configurations.
The F/A rating is not the most important one and you should be fine while you take your time experimenting with new configuration until you go for a full-scale replacement of your old cabins.
Although we designed the transition in a way that doe not force players to take immediate action (as in: the same day or very shortly after the patch), the assumption was and still is that players will replace their cabin configurations eventually over a course of a few weeks.
Remember that you can remove legacy configs from your airplanes with the value being refunded and that bulk-actions in fleet management should make replacements of cabin configs comparably painless and swift.
I don't agree that it affects all players the same way. It hurts those players who employed more F/A's as part of their overall service option.
75% of my F/A's are now redundant. So my competitor who has a package with the minimum number of F/A's now has lower costs and an advantage until I update my cabin configurations. In the new configurations I may not employ the same number of F/A's, but I didn't expect to have to fix the problem so urgently. Are the redundancy costs also being refunded?
I don't agree that it affects all players the same way. It hurts those players who employed more F/A's as part of their overall service option.
75% of my F/A's are now redundant. So my competitor who has a package with the minimum number of F/A's now has lower costs and an advantage until I update my cabin configurations. In the new configurations I may not employ the same number of F/A's, but I didn't expect to have to fix the problem so urgently. Are the redundancy costs also being refunded?
What happens if we remove the current/old seating configuration first and subsequently assign the new configuration instead of just replacing them straight away? Could this be a "trick" to avoid the huge F/A surplus/bug? We'll still be entitled to get the refund if we use this workaround?
It doesn't matter if you change the cabin directly or remove it first and then assign a new one, you get your refund at both ways. But the cabin change itself has nothing to do with the F/A surplus, because it came with the new configuration tool and so everyone on every server is already affected right now.
there were 12.000 flight attendants who refuse to work in my airline :-)
But I don't only pay salaries to get 5 red bars for flight attendants, I also get 5 red bars for seat space... in a fleet that purely uses ecoplus and business premium seats.
If I took my time and experimented a bit with the new seats, it would drag down my airline image. So I have decided to quickly refurbish my fleet. If I have to refurbish them again in the future, so be it. It takes a few days to earn the money for new seats, it takes ages to raise your airline image.
The new cabin editor looks excellent. It is an improvement and I like it. But...
- although the new editor was tested, changing from one system to the other clearly wasn't.
- "it affects everybody in the same way" is a poor excuse, and not even true.
When I created my new seating configurations under the new system, I was able to add virtually all of my surplus flight attendants back to their former jobs--problem solved!
I agree that we could have been warned that this was coming but it really should not be that serious of a problem for airlines that keep configurations similar to the ones they had before.
I agree that we could have been warned that this was coming but it really should not be that serious of a problem for airlines that keep configurations similar to the ones they had before.
If we knew it before we would have avoided it from happen in the first place or we would have announced it in the email. Problem is that it was simply not noticed before because we used only the confugurator but did not changed an old seating into a new one.... so it was coming as a surprise to us as well.