ITRs have been active in Paine for quite some time now. As expected, there still quite a few things about them that aren’t perfect. Some of those issues are simply missing but planned modifications or features (see overview). Others are balancing problems that require fiddling with the system’s parameters.
Especially the latter is what I am interested in right now. As I’d like to broaden the ITR trial (potentially with a new temporary game world), I’d like to know which issues you think are the most pressing at the moment.
I have a few items on my list already, but I’d like to hear your perspective as actual players.
First I have to say I love this feature as it basically enables different business models and allow airlines to “choose” their target customers and much broader range of strategies.
The most painful point I have encountered is the imbalance of passengers on two directions of the same route. I’m sure that the dev team is aware of this (it’s already listed as a known issue), but it’s actually much worse than one might think: on some routes I have to introduce a ~10% price difference between outbound and inbound to maintain the same load factor, and on some other routes the outbound flight has much more business customers than economy ones, or the other way around. This actually has made pricing and cabin layout planning very difficult, and in my point of view is not quite realistic: in real world, most passengers, although not all, fly round trips: they return to where they started eventually.
Still, have to say I love this much more than the old model. Hope this imbalance issue can be addressed soon!
Little different perspective from me, I don’t have a lot of time to play so after 3-4 restarts I gave up for now after not figuring out a profitable system.
For me the biggest problem is the outdated ORS, service profile info, etc. that is still displayed (but says it has no meaningful effect) so I’m basically guessing for everything.
sometimes bad/outdated info is worse or more confusing than no info at all.
After a 2-3 failed attempts over the past six months, I’m now closing my second week of profitability in a major market with a unique strategy that would never work in a traditional server. I have much optimism for ITRs, but do not have the experience to provide valuable feedback. As a new player, I can currently relate to Loge’s feeling of being pretty blind.
Huh, I expected this to be an issue (hence the item on the list of known issues) but can’t remember anyone actually mentioning it before. So thanks, good to know
Do others share this experience?
Either way: It was the hardest nut to crack for the Technology Demonstrator and I might never find a satisfactory solution for the current generation of AirlineSim. But I haven’t really looked into it in detail yet. The root issue is that for each and every pair of origin and destination, AirlineSim would have to generate all connections in both directions either at the same time (massive performance impact) or log requests and bookings for the return direction (far from perfect solution). Maybe there’s something in between, but it’s a topic for research once I’ve got a few brain cycles to spare
I agree on all mentioned issues. Imbalance on some routes seems odd, although until now I had no clue why that is. An idea for how to make it feasible: the ITR should use a 50/50 distribution for a route: Lets say LHR-LOS. 50% PAX are willing to pay more, as LHR is financially strong, while 50% are at the lower end for LOS. Still, it means double the calulations for the system… As on all servers, since that is an ongoing general issue, its far to easy to make profits. We talked about that 4U airline in Europe, we talked about too low fares on TATL routes. As long as margins are as high as they are, there will always be players that just massively dump on some routes, because they can still make good money elsewhere. Id also refer to fuel prices at this point: they should be unfiltered / undampened, mostly because it forces airlines to react instead of just keeping everything as is, sacrificing a very few % margin.
Off topic here but as an airline with almost 1000 aircrafts (not Paine), some features need to become available before cancelling the damper, e.g., pause of flights (possibly by batch) and tempory disable maintenance of certain aircrafts (to temporily cease fuel guzzlers and get fuel efficient aircrafts while avoiding 15% extra maintenance). I consider myself as a fast scheduler but the fastest I can do is to schedule 30 narrow body in 1 hour without thinking too much, and that means you need 33 hours minimum if you have to touch 1000 aircrafts, not to say some airlines have way more (and some at multiple servers)
Yes. Not totally unrelated though, as it is about balancing demand and profitability. Tbh a more forward looking fleet management would prevent such issues like the one you’re mentioning, with managing a huge fleet, but also make it harder to dump prices as its done right now due to the ITR being so extremely price sensitive.
