Messages

76

General Chat / How many people charge for drinks/food?

« on: December 28, 2007, 07:49:14 pm »

I saw this option in the game and am wondering how many people do this.  Is it time realistic?  Back in the day people would get dressed up for flights and everyone got food and drinks for free.  I'm thinking that charging for this in the 70's would pretty much make you go under.  Do people actually do this?

77

General Chat / Where's that 747Sp

« on: December 24, 2007, 09:16:31 pm »

Someone has $400M euros to use to buy a plane already?

78

General Chat / Rant - Im done

« on: December 19, 2007, 12:30:28 am »

"but it stopped being fun some time ago on a day to day basis"

If that's the case then reasons 1-3 are really of no consequence are they?  Given that you were one of the largest airlines in the game I'm not sure why you should be so angry.  

myefre,

I think the problem is that the world in AM has just too many passengers in compared to real life.  Airlines don't ever get the chance to sit on $80B.  The airline world in AM seems much bigger than the market in the actual world.

79

General Chat / When Is The Next Reset?

« on: December 18, 2007, 06:40:01 am »

That is true of every reset.  The game gets reset after a while.

80

General Chat / Rant - Im done

« on: December 18, 2007, 06:38:45 am »

"and 1.5 billion was/is peanuts to me..."

Given that you had one of the largest airlines in the game, of course it wouldn't matter.  To everyone else it does.  Do you really want even niche players running a $1 LAX-SFO route because money no longer matters.  While 2 was a mistake, 3 is really the only way to deal with it.

81

Bugs / Massive money bug

« on: December 17, 2007, 07:22:35 pm »

"If you don't want the money, play as if it isn't there. Forget about it. Treat it as a major screw-up by some of your accountants, and have an admin delete it. If you want the money, use it and do something fun with it. As long as you don't scrap planes just to annoy other people, I don't care. Your competitors get richer as well, and I'm pretty sure most of them will take the money and keep their mouths shut. So you've just found yourself a new challenge."

That would be great.  Now if you can convince every other player to do the same, we might have a game again.  Otherwise, the advise is really of no significance.  Following it would mean that my competition just got 2 TRILLION in investment out of nowhere.  

"@Database Restore: You have absolutely no idea how angry some people will get if they find their airline kicked back a few weeks. They'd much rather take the 1.5 billion."

Your backup strategy is to back things up every few weeks?  Ever think of what would happen if say you had two drive failures before you rebuilt the array that the server was running, had an electrical surge wipe out your database server or a fire at the house/data center where the database server is stored?  What would you do if the database was corrupted somehow.  I realize this might be all new to you guys, but you should have nightly jobs to backup the database and hourly jobs to backup the logs.  Restoring from a database copy should not cause weeks of lost data.  You should be able to restore to a specific point in time very easily.  I know that a site that doesn't charge anything doesn't require five 9's of uptime, but a backup strategy of creating a backup every two weeks is the same as none at all.

I certainly hope that you take away access to the administration for whoever created this mess.  I hope you also work to come up with ways of dealing with this should it happen again.  Given that there is no real resolution for this, you guys should look at restarting the game again a little earlier rather than later.  It's the only way to clean things up.

82

Bugs / Massive money bug

« on: December 17, 2007, 06:26:00 pm »

"Stop complaining, will you?

Even in real life luck can smile to you; I know you won't get $1.5B just out of magic but still...
And anyway everyone got their $1.5B so it's not realistic maybe but it is not unfair
Concerniing new players, well the game is already hyperoversaturrated so they might just as well wait for the next round.

I don't know how you say that in English but errare humanum est (making mistake human is humane) so stop blaming the administration"

I have a pretty valid point.  That round, as it existed, is now over.  I wasted quote a bit of time dealing with that competetive landscape.  The game is entirely changed now.  Someone giving say a trillion dollars in investment to my competitors does rather play poorly for my prospects.  

That's a great resolution.  Wait until the last round.  Perhaps that should be on the front page of the game site.  If the round didn't just start, you might as well wait 4 months for it to reset.  

I quite fully understand that to err is human.  I have worked and do work with information systems all of the time.  Programming changes have to be tested before they are put in place and things such as changing system settings for one user have to very carefully be done or else the entire game is impacted.  Were this someone at Blizzard or Sony making this mistake, they'd probably be at home creating an account on Monster right now.  People do make mistakes, even big ones, but they should be willing to put the work forward to remedy the mistakes.  

This should have been taken care or RIGHT AWAY.  A backup of the database should have been restored.  Taking the money back now that every gate in existence has been taken is really not the point.  The game has been irrevocably changed by someone who made a mistake, but there has been NO effort to right that mistake.  I have every right to blame the administration.  Nowhere in the wiki, the game site, forums, etc, is it that said that massive amounts of capital will be given to the entire game base at random.

I was quite happy working up to the point where I'd get my company to $1B.  I was quite happy with hitting $40M in 3 days.  The sad thing now that is milestone is meaningless and enjoyment of growing the business to get there is gone.  

"and if you see it as magically appearing imagine you sold another company and put the money into the airline (its not hard to do) "

Yes, it's normal in aviation for $30M companies to sell a $1.5B company and invest the entire amount into the aviation industry.  This was common in 1955.     What is even more common is for every airline in the entire world to do this at the same time.  It's common for global capital flows to inject the current dollar value of $14 Trillion into one industry.  In case you're counting, that's close to 2x the entire GDP of the United States.

Fixing the game instead of doing nothing might be a good idea.

83

General Chat / What to do with $3B? (winner gets a connie)

« on: December 17, 2007, 04:27:18 pm »

Out of curiosity, why would the official brokers bother with what they do?  It's not like they're really playing a game.  They're selling in game items to other who play a game.  It doesn't sound entertaining to me.

84

Bugs / Massive money bug

« on: December 17, 2007, 03:50:35 pm »

It's not weird at all.  People are playing a game because they get to simulate what an airline might be like.  You spend time making realistic routes, real planes, real statistics and then suddenly someone magical gives every airline in the world, no matter how good, bad, active or inactive 1.5B$.  I spent many hours making an airline that was profitable and growing.  It seems now that I could have sat back and just waited for someone to incorrectly doll out money by mistake.  

This will now lead to routes where few people care how profitable they are.

Already there are NO GATES left.  At least in North America anyways.

While you have given me $1.5B, you have also done so to my competitors.

The point is not only that I don't want the $1.5B, but that I don't want anyone to have the $1.5B.  I've signed up, followed the rules and spent time learning a game and finding routes and finally had my airline making enough money for things to be interesting.  That has all been ruined by poor programming/administration.  

Taking the money away from me does not solve the problem.  Everyone else now has $1.5B to expand into my routes and fly a Constellation between A and B for $1.  This is totally unrealistic.

Also, someone mentioned new people.  When I started there were people who had airlines anywhere from $1M on up in value.  Now they're competing against billionaires across the board.  

Whoever made this mistake should be rushing to fix it.  Not saying, oops, you can just keep the money. :oops:

85

Bugs / Massive money bug

« on: December 17, 2007, 03:29:58 pm »

Mysteriously, all of the gates at airports above 2.5M passengers on my continent are now taken.  Do you guys take database backups?  The only real way to fix this is to roll back to how things were supposed to be before this mistake was made.  Otherwise, the game is kind of cooked.

86

Bugs / Massive money bug

« on: December 17, 2007, 03:17:05 pm »

Ugh, I wanted to get to that point by work not through a game error.  There are also plenty of people who haven't earned this much.  Can we please look at a way of remedying this?  It sort of makes all of the hard work I've put into this over the weekend seem worthless.

87

General Chat / BROKERS - Advice to airlines using them.

« on: December 16, 2007, 04:10:47 am »

Wow, 10% off of a pretend airplane.  Is it really worth the hassle of figuring out how a broker works, giving someone else a cut and saving what is likely not that much compared to your daily income?

88

General Chat / Pricing and resultant wars...

« on: December 15, 2007, 07:02:05 pm »

"Well, I think you can always send a message to that airline and try to talk things out, I think that there is a fair amount of airlines out there who would be more than happy to deal things out than make a fare war."

You can be sued or go to jail for doing things like this in real life.

89

General Chat / Government mandated minimum pricing on leases and sales ?

« on: December 15, 2007, 04:29:29 pm »

I don't want to sell a DC-3 for that much.  I also don't want to put it in the queue of 400 DC-3's all at the same price hoping that mine will sell.  I just scrapped it instead.  Selling or leasing out just seems more hassle than its worth.

90

General Chat / Government mandated minimum pricing on leases and sales ?

« on: December 15, 2007, 08:13:03 am »

I tried leasing out and selling an airplane today.  The game limits what you can do for pricing.  Is this not totally unrealistic?  Why shouldn't I be allowed to sell a plane for what I want?  I'm not just going to scrap the plane as it's not worth it to go through the hassle otherwise.