At the moment we have 16 servers. With the same amount of servers I would distribute it the following way:
3 short term servers of each 9 months in length. (opening one every three months)
4 medium length servers of each 2 years in duration. (opening one every 6 months)
5 long term servers of each 5 year in duration. (opening one every year)
4 endless servers (opening a new one when an old one is older than 10 years or no longer profitable)
And why should players who spent years on building their airlines now have their game world turn into a 6 months or 2 year one?
I just cannot understand why so many newbies come up with so silly ideas.
And before you answer with a comment about… , yes, it is possible to build a large and successful airline on old severs. Yes there is plenty of space in almost any country if all legacy game worlds are counted together you can find space in USA, China, Brazil, Europe, Turkey, Australia, anything you can think of. Yes it takes time and dedication and constant scanning for opportunities.
And no, you will not be able to have your very first airline set up ever, based in LHR, become the next Air Romania of Idlewild or Liberty Group of Pearls.
Based on the number of players on the short term servers I do think Airlinesim would benefit more with more focus on short term servers. Like one poster said...have a 9 month server come up every 3 months so that anyone wanting to get in the game and get started on an even keel could do so. These servers appear to be the most financially rewarding to airlinesim as well so it makes sense for them to create more of them.
I also agree that a focus on 3-5 year servers would make a ton of sense. Preferably with one opening up every year or so. To me, five years is a natural breaking point based on the number of players left in order servers. Plus...having run multiple airlines on multiple servers including new startups in a clean world (Aspern) and starting up a small contender airline in a legacy server against the big boys to only become the new big airline (Devau)
As to the legacy worlds I propose that we leave them be but generally not create too many more of these types of servers. It is possible to break in on these servers with a well thought out plan AND some luck. I went from a small nobody on Devau to the only carrier in Canada. And I did it without truly attacking any of my competitors. A smart player could build a decently sized airline even now with a good plan (and if they waited for higher AGEX)
In any case....these servers should open on a regular basis on set dates preferably the first of the month or another easy day to remember....so that every player can have an even chance of starting on day 1. Every day you start late in the bigger markets truly hurts.
And why should players who spent years on building their airlines now have their game world turn into a 6 months or 2 year one?
I just cannot understand why so many newbies come up with so silly ideas.
And before you answer with a comment about… , yes, it is possible to build a large and successful airline on old severs. Yes there is plenty of space in almost any country if all legacy game worlds are counted together you can find space in USA, China, Brazil, Europe, Turkey, Australia, anything you can think of. Yes it takes time and dedication and constant scanning for opportunities.
And no, you will not be able to have your very first airline set up ever, based in LHR, become the next Air Romania of Idlewild or Liberty Group of Pearls.
I never said or meant to imply I would close down server or change their duration. In the paragraph above I said "This would mostly be as a possible replacement for an existing one when one might eventually be closed due to a lack of paying players on these servers." With this line I tried to make clear that as some endless servers might eventually close, due to whatever reason (I think its most likely that these are no longer profitable), you can open up new ones. And that I mentioned I would use 16 servers in a different way didn't mean I would limit the amount of servers to 16 (so, maybe I shouldn't have used that number as it can be confusing for what I intended to mean).
I expect these endless game worlds to still make money and as these also have some of the more "hardcore" users I don't see any reason to shut these down. However, for new servers I don't think endless servers are the way to go. The endless server are probably making less money than the new ones as they have far less paying players. Also, it doesn't inspire people that much to start playing the game if they feel there is no game world they can be successful in (which I think is true for a lot of people judging by the posts about it on the forums and my expectation that there are far more that don't even get to the forums). These new players are very important to create future growth and allow for possible new options in the future that might require some larger scale (I know there is also a limitation to the amount of work the development team can do, as it is not a big company that just can scale up and such).
And to be clear, I'm not one of those players who don't know how to establish themselves on a permanent server. That's not why I'm mentioning this. I've been around for a few years now and know how the game works, so I wouldn't call myself newbie.
Just think of how unrealistic establishing a new server is. There will never be a completed open market where everyone starts fairly in the real life so why should there be so many in AS. Penetrating markets is part of the game.
At the moment we have 16 servers. With the same amount of servers I would distribute it the following way:
3 short term servers of each 9 months in length. (opening one every three months)
4 medium length servers of each 2 years in duration. (opening one every 6 months)
5 long term servers of each 5 year in duration. (opening one every year)
4 endless servers (opening a new one when an old one is older than 10 years or no longer profitable)
This is a great suggestion to allow differentiation! ( Except if it says endless it really should be endless, as currently is ).
To solve the problem that Airlinesim right now has 2 short terms and 14 endless servers I propose the following transition:
4 of the 14 endless servers (random) remain as is.
5 of the 14 endless servers (random) are announced to be converted to "long term" servers, and will be reset 3-8 years from now ( to give 1 per year on rotation ).
4 of the 14 endless servers (random) are announced to be converted to "medium length" servers, and will be reset 3-5 years from now ( to give 2 per year on rotation).
1 of the 14 endless servers (random) is announced to be converted to a "short term" server, and will be reset ~3 years from now.
Before the current endless servers end players of large corporations (100+ airplanes) can at any time (to spread it out) opt for a transfer to any of the 4 remaining endless servers. This process sells their company but allow them to move all the ingame money to start a new company at any of the 4 remaining endless servers. ( So it's possible to keep the progress you worked for ).
This allows everyone 3 more years of playtime as is + reimbursement of loyal long term customers who built up large airlines, and I think it would be fair to players and within airlinesims terms of service as well. It also would allow Airlinesim to experiment much more with the various modifiers that exists on servers ( transfer times, demand, used/no used aircraft, slots ).
It would also allow players much more frequent new servers opening up to enjoy or try out different things.
This is a great suggestion to allow differentiation! ( Except if it says endless it really should be endless, as currently is ).
To solve the problem that Airlinesim right now has 2 short terms and 14 endless servers I propose the following transition:
4 of the 14 endless servers (random) remain as is.
5 of the 14 endless servers (random) are announced to be converted to "long term" servers, and will be reset 3-8 years from now ( to give 1 per year on rotation ).
4 of the 14 endless servers (random) are announced to be converted to "medium length" servers, and will be reset 3-5 years from now ( to give 2 per year on rotation).
1 of the 14 endless servers (random) is announced to be converted to a "short term" server, and will be reset ~3 years from now.
Before the current endless servers end players of large corporations (100+ airplanes) can at any time (to spread it out) opt for a transfer to any of the 4 remaining endless servers. This process sells their company but allow them to move all the ingame money to start a new company at any of the 4 remaining endless servers. ( So it's possible to keep the progress you worked for ).
This allows everyone 3 more years of playtime as is + reimbursement of loyal long term customers who built up large airlines, and I think it would be fair to players and within airlinesims terms of service as well. It also would allow Airlinesim to experiment much more with the various modifiers that exists on servers ( transfer times, demand, used/no used aircraft, slots ).
It would also allow players much more frequent new servers opening up to enjoy or try out different things.
Good joke. Let's see how you stand against a competitor that comes to play against you on your server with $200 billion AS$ cash after selling his company.
Good joke. Let's see how you stand against a competitor that comes to play against you on your server with $200 billion AS$ cash after selling his company.
I would very much enjoy such a fresh challenge as long as I know the player have earned that AS$ cash fairly elsewhere. If I played for years on the same server with very little action/competition anymore it would be a great way to "liven it up" and have things happen, or to quickly fill holes left by other major players that quit ( which happens on a weekly basis ).
I only had a single airline for more then a year on a permanent server but shut it down when there was no serious competition for months and my 100x Boeing 747-8s ( 30% of which I fully owned ) were flying all over the world and my 4 hub airports were maxed out in slots.
I dont like temp servers. People complain on here all the time that its impossible to start a new airline in an old world. Yes its difficult but its not hard either. Temp worlds are full of people that dont play tactically or realistically and it ruins the game. I myself have restarted so many times on older servers until I get it right and when you do its brilliant.
Then you see the people who create a brand new airline in LHR with 3% slots and no connections and terrible ORS getting annoyed when their LHR to NY flights are not filling up and come on here and complain about it being impossible under the “But look LHR to NY in real life is the busiest international route” argument and blames everyone else as well as the game for that.
Then you see the people who create a brand new airline in LHR with 3% slots and no connections and terrible ORS getting annoyed when their LHR to NY flights are not filling up and come on here and complain about it being impossible under the "But look LHR to NY in real life is the busiest international route" argument and blames everyone else as well as the game for that.
Before the current endless servers end players of large corporations (100+ airplanes) can at any time (to spread it out) opt for a transfer to any of the 4 remaining endless servers. This process sells their company but allow them to move all the ingame money to start a new company at any of the 4 remaining endless servers. ( So it's possible to keep the progress you worked for ).
To be honest its not as much about the money that I care about my airlines as it is about the time put in. Building up my current airline on an other world would be not too different with 10 million or 5 billion as I wont anyways have the time to schedule all those planes from the start. The difference biggest different is creating all those schedules that I have put quite some work in for. Let´s say I have spend 5 minutes per schedule on 800 planes, that is a minimum of 66 hours, plus all the time I have spent researching the market building, relations and managing my alliance.
Most of my Quimby-Airlines are successful. I'm in the stats among the top 20 airlines of that particular region from start to end.
On established worlds, I tend to look for niche regions (example: remote islands, where none of the big players is bothered by my airline). There, on the old servers, my companies mostly work out fine, too. However, growth is much, much, much slower than on Quimby. So - it's a bit like having a turtle. Beautiful animal, but you wouldn't really want to create a "funny turtle videos" YouTube channel.
This leads me to the conclusion that any Quimby server does provide me with more bang for the buck: I do get on Quimby the latest software release with all the bells and whistles features, more market opportunity and more "return of fun" than I would get for the same amount of AS credits on the old, unlimited servers.
The downside of limited-time worlds? Actually - none for me. Each time the server is being restarted, I am trying to create an even more successful airline in yet another region.
I do agree, that I am being selfish here. Quimby suits my style of game-play best. Just wanted to share my opinion, before all get Uber-Excited, where the AS team might decide that we don't need Quimby worlds anymore.
That's a very interesting view, thanks for sharing it. It's good to also hear people saying why the actually enjoy time-limited game worlds.
There shouldn't be anything to worry about the time-limited game worlds, as they have been doing well.
If AirlineSim decides to launch a long-term game world, it will be an additional one and not replacing Quimby or Otto. Otto will see a re-launch as a time-limited game world as usual.
My crystal ball says we might see the launch of Otto III tomorrow - so nobody would have to take a day off, but can simply enjoy the week-end on a new game world.:)