Where's all the passengers in Paine?

[martin]

Quoting the announcement post for Paine:

This world is intended as a space to develop, test, and fine-tune new features in a production-like environment with real players and real data—before rolling them out to existing or future worlds. As a result, things may be a bit unstable at times. That’s why Paine comes at the low rate of just 2 credits/day and is restricted to Premium accounts.

And for more details, please check out the FAQ about Paine. In particular:

@martin

Why is it so cheap?

Technically, Paine is a long-term/unlimited game world. But given that it is essentially a testing ground, there are a few things one has to keep in mind:

• As features are in development, their behavior might change at any time.
• Bugs might occur at any time, including such that actually break things and/or cause data loss.
• Sometimes, in-game data (like schedules or bookings) might be deleted to facility quicker development cycles or migrations.
• Geo and aircraft data changes that wouldn’t be rolled out to production game worlds because they might break things are applied in Paine, for example airport size changes that affect turnaround times.
• Although unlikely and not planned, under some circumstances, a complete reset of the game world might be required.

Consequently, I can’t price this game world at the standard price point of regular long-term game worlds. At the same time, I want to make sure inactive accounts disappear eventually and that there’s incentive for players to delete their airlines in Paine should they loose interest. Hence the symbolic price of 2 credits per day.