Airline Club

Since the weather is changing quite rapidly in Vancouver, i might get trapped indoor for the next few months due to the rainy weather boooo

which means i might spend a bit more time coding.

Before getting to V2, I have a list (expanding) things that I want to work on first:

1. Add a filter/settings to increase the limit (currently 2k) of airports people can view on the UI, the game DB has i think close to 8k? airports but i decided to only show 2K (largest/most "powerful" ones) due to performance concern and i assume the smaller ones that are hidden will not get any pax at all. Turned out that i could be wrong (?) as there are reports that some players managed to reveal those hidden airports and get pax going (perhaps for transits? i dunno)

2. Review the code and the libraries used for the websocket. It always bugs me that the time ticker just stops working after an hour or 2. It's true that the time ticker is not even accurate now, BUT another main feature of the websocket is that once a cycle is completed, the flight map and balance should update automatically without requiring a user manual refresh, this feature is kinda screwed due to the broken websocket. And also this could as well be the reason that the chat is not stable and disconnect/reconnects so often

3. maybe more...

Just a quick dump of thoughts during my break at work...need to get back to work now

I agree with that.

The whole database could use an update too. A lot of airports are missing, others have been closed for years but are still present in the database. And the airport scale system is flawed. However I think that's something for V2.

Also the openness of the markets should be reworked. For each country there should be a list in which countries an airline from that country is allowed to start a base in. That's the way it works in real life too. And all countries should accept foreign airlines and international connections!

I think just getting the site/system stable needs to be top priority...

I actually think that the number of countries with open markets should be limited to mostly poor ones. This way new players will be shielded from big airlines settling in somewhere they don't belong

I disagree completely with "locking" people out of markets and RL analogies are not transferable at all.

On one hand there are plenty of bilateral and multilateral agreements where airlines can setup shop in other countries different from their origin, more importantly however airlines can easily setup subsidiaries in as many countries as they want and thus expand. The reason this is not happening is because of the vast "alliance" system that's prevalent right now which has the same effect.

The game needs less rules and limitations, not more it is tediously cumbersome with rules and limitations as is.

The rep system needs to be replaced. It should not be based on flat pax numbers but rather on a combination of factors that add up to a rating in a given country.

For example:

Total Pax numbers: 1-10 points
Transfer pax number: 1-10 points
Service quality: 1-10 points
Profitability: 1-10 points
Network diversity (number of routes from or to airports n the given country
): 1-10 points
Plane condition (of planes to and from airports in the same country): 1-10 points
relations with the country: 1-10 points
total base levels (add the levels of all bases present in the country x2 for levels in the HQ): 1-10 points

The ranking can be done either for each category then sum up the points per airline based on the rank in each category, or by a set criteria that assigns points in each category and then sum those up for each airline.

Also it can be done by grouping some countries in a regional ranking systems to avoid micro country distortions. For example "Caribbean islands" as one competition zone.

Remove inactive users (to give back the resource they occupied)

I mean you don't have to remove them, but just have a cron job to check those users and cash them out
so they can still enjoy the money they make once they come back.

I can create a branch to develop this feature if you want.

In addition to this, it would be nice if you could mark yourself as inactive, and have your airline stop ticking until you log in again, or unmark yourself as inactive (maybe with a minimum time limit?)

It is possible to integrate some third party hosted chat (discord?) into the game?

Unfortunately, all of the chat widgets I have seen don't (at the time I looked at them years ago) seem to support account integration, which may not be ideal as identities of the chatters can become confusing. So I may not be the best person to recommend any of them.