The topic is self-explanatory. Add premium economy class to the gaming system please! I guess it is needless to say how necessary is this.
I'll also use this thread to make a small complaint. This game has been updating at a peculiarly slow speed. We players pay very big price to play this game. Nowadays 1000 credits, or ~ $40 can very much buy me a 3A level game. And it is a periodical charge. I have only played AS for three years, and I have put hundreds of euros in. I am sure the hardcore fans devote way bigger digits than this in AS. Thus developers should not ALWAYS use some technical difficulties excuse to defend this lack of update and patches. Because you CHARGE over time. AS is not free.
Ok you are a small team. There are a lot of small teams that do excellent jobs keeping their products up to date. And Ok it might be complicated to make new features. Then make the making process open source. I am sure there are enough qualified programmers willing to join your developing team for free. Not only on the aircraft data. Steam workshop has been proven a plus for many games.
I want to remind simulogics that it is not a right gesture, nor a right business strategy to not moving forward only because consumers have to choose AS because AS is the only playable game in the category.
I would expect a promise that the developers will keep putting on efforts to bring players new and great contents. I neither expect nor want to hear a 1000 word essay explaining how hard it is to make a game. If so why don't you cut price off a bit, because I, and many people would think it does not worth it. Don't fail the user's expect on you, and really don't take everything for granted.
Well there is/was something called booking classes being developed. Not sure whats happened to it, I suspect its been postponed while Prosperous Universe is being developed.
I too, have put hundreds of Euros(Dollars) into this game. I am content with the pace of development. The new booking classes have been in the works, and when they have them finalized we will see them. If they put this class in without all the appropriate demand calculations, it simply wouldn’t work, so I’ll wait.
If you are that unhappy, there’s always the option to walk away.
I too am happy with the progress on the game development - though it would be nice to get an update on the booking classes - which I am sure is coming soon :) (the update that is)
I agree. Pace of development and new features is very slow. But I do not agree that for the "huge amount of money" you or we can expect more features and a better update service. The whole setup of hardware, maintenance and of course PU is expensive and Simulogic (the company behind AS) wants to earn money with their services. Which is fair enough and I hope they do earn money with it as it is the only airline simulation running for 15 years now (or even longer). No other simulation can offer what AS can. And not at all for that price. For 40 or even 100 EUR you will not be able to buy a game like AS. Never ever.
I do also understand your call for new features and a better service and customer support. Here comes in place what TalOn said: there is always the option to walk away. Which could be an option to make AS aware that - if nothing will happen - they will loose a lot of players.
And you see all these replies defending for the developers. Ok there is something developed, then why aren't they releasing it? Why every single release takes months and months? Let me remind those who kept defending in this angle. If the game is free, I don't mind waiting at all. E.g. LSPDFR. But AS charges, which technically means every single release they promise actually cost. The longer you wait from its news release, the more you pay. So do we have a lot of trillionaires on this forum who don't consider $50 a considerate amount? There are still a lot of poor kids unable to drink pure water in the world.
Certainly, that's why you don't get a 10 times better sim game. Which you could have. So the case is not so much different around the world. For those who tell me to walk away, unfortunately, I would not simply because this is the only thing available, and the sunk cost is too big. I just don't want to tolerate 1998 game called CAAC, which achieved 70% of AS but contents were obsolete. People seem to have a misunderstanding that those who play AS must be happy. This logically makes no sense. Try to not make this discussion toxic, does the development company pay you? If the company doesn't pay you why do you all seem to be very mad about people raising different voices? Is this suggestion not beneficial for both players, and the company since it should attract more players? I have always wondered why the discussion atmosphere is so one-sided that my fellow players would desperately want me to go away instead of making the game better. Is this a strategy so once I left you took my #1 airline in China on Gatow? Smart.
The game CAAC, at the time of 1998, was kept adding features. The development company called Kingsoft, treated their products fairly seriously. And this company is now an open-traded, renowned tycoon.
Oh and of course it is moved to "suggestion and ideas". lol.
I agree. Pace of development and new features is very slow. But I do not agree that for the "huge amount of money" you or we can expect more features and a better update service. The whole setup of hardware, maintenance and of course PU is expensive and Simulogic (the company behind AS) wants to earn money with their services. Which is fair enough and I hope they do earn money with it as it is the only airline simulation running for 15 years now (or even longer). No other simulation can offer what AS can. And not at all for that price. For 40 or even 100 EUR you will not be able to buy a game like AS. Never ever.
I do also understand your call for new features and a better service and customer support. Here comes in place what TalOn said: there is always the option to walk away. Which could be an option to make AS aware that - if nothing will happen - they will loose a lot of players.
I can tell you what ~600 USD would do, which is roughly what I have put in AS. It means fully authorized Adobe CC suite, it means a permanent license of Snapgene, it means 9893465987237854 R6 credits (even for Ubisoft!). I can give you a million examples of services developed by small companies which require constant support and maintenance but is cheaper than AS. but do you think AS is half complicated than scientific tools like snapgene? It only charges ~$699 even with an NIH grant for its development. I pay for every Aerosoft addons I could afford because that's some work that worth $70.
This is not an official team reply, it is just my personal opinion.
The credits you pay are NOT meant as funds to develop the game further. The daily credits are charged to use the current version of the game. That money is used to pay for the servers and is a reward for investments already made (previous development).
Ideally there would be enough people paying for the game to create a hefty profit, which in turn would incentivize the developer to invest more (time and money) to improve the software version.
While it seems that the game has a quite steady number of supporters, it is also obvious that the few thousand players are not enough to generate enough funds to really invest more money into the software. It gets developed on a, I’d call it hobby base. It generates too much cash to let it die, but too little to take it much further.
I guess it’s a known secret, that there won’t be many new features, or at least not on a regular basis. If something gets released, than it’s a nice to have benefit, but nothing you should really expect.
I can understand your frustrations and I am sure a few people share them, at least every now and then someone is criticising the pace of development. Raising your voice is good. It provides the developers with feedback, if they choose to listen.
I've been at that frustration point and took a break for 1,5 to 2 years. I came back because even though nothing changed, I was simply in the mood again to play this game with it's rather unique feature to build up your network from the ground up, at any airport.
I am also sure at some point I get bored again of the static nature of the game in it's current state and will leave if no new features get introduced. Basically voting with my wallet.
This is not an official team reply, it is just my personal opinion.
The credits you pay are NOT meant as funds to develop the game further. The daily credits are charged to use the current version of the game. That money is used to pay for the servers and is a reward for investments already made
Again personal opinion but I have to agree with Matth. You don’t pay for what airlinesim could be, you pay for what it is when you buy your credits. The majority of this goes onto on going costs, not development
You must realize players of aviation games is a very limited customer base. Aviation games or Sims are not a spopular as more mainstream games like world of tanks. And even within aviation geeks community, it’s split between those who want to fly (flight sims) and those who want to manage (business Sims). There are four major airline sims in the market, one is free, one is paid but looks more like a computer game, and one is 90’s look turn based. There were some other airline simulations that stopped or went bankrupt. The market simply is not there to have 2 or 3 items the user base even with more extensive features.
And the more features there are, the more complicated and challenging it gets for newbies to stay past the 2 weeks trial period. You can see this trend in trial airlines which are two weeks have not even a single airplane, or have airplanes but no routes. The rate of abandonment is very high. AS tried to remedy this by launching time limited worlds, where people are mor elikely to build something going and gain experience than on established worlds.
To conclude, while we AV geeks seem to think half the world is like us, only a handful are really interested in aviation. And out of them even more limited number has time to play something. And then there is the flying and managing sim split. Then you have split between 4 competing products. When it trickles down to potential customer base, it is very limited, and that’s why developers have decided to put their future faith in a Sci fi simulation with potentially more widespread acceptance and attractiveness to wider public.
To conclude, while we AV geeks seem to think half the world is like us, only a handful are really interested in aviation. And out of them even more limited number has time to play something. And then there is the flying and managing sim split. Then you have split between 4 competing products. When it trickles down to potential customer base, it is very limited, and that's why developers have decided to put their future faith in a Sci fi simulation with potentially more widespread acceptance and attractiveness to wider public.
This is the sad truth. This is a very unique niche of a game. After thinking about this on a personal note I would be willing to pay double the current credits per server if it meant a more dedicated development team. I think this game is so amazing, but it definitely needs some work, and it probably always will.