[Duplicated] The future of AirportCEO - Multiplayer Persistent World Environment

Airport CEO Support
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What is the future of AirportCEO? I’d love to see a roadmap [features] and future business revenue stream ideas [DLC].

In absence of this roadmap and, given my searching skills using this forum found nothing similar, I want to suggest something that I have not seen yet

Multi-player permanent environment. Each player connects to a server that hosts the world. Usual problems with ping and connectivity and service level agreements and what not, but this Airport CEO game does not need real-time (near enough would be good enough) connectivity. It need sporadic connectivity to maintain flight information. Really, planes are in the air a long time so why need to tell each and every player every second that an inbound flight is -1 second closer. Uh-huh. No, block update in data burst streams on broadcast technology - I’d multicast in safe environment, but in wide world something else.

So, there is a world and players connect and start an airport in their own little back yard. Many players will gravitate to trying to build an airport near a big city, London, New York, wherever. There is competition already there. Both real existing players with their own airports built and operational and AI managed airport, Heathrow, La Guardia, etc who are competing for the contracts that are available. In fact, those AI airports resent these little upstart johnny no-good competitor airports starting up and leverage their reputation, renown, money and power to thwart the new starter. A good CEO would eventually buy out Heathrow and demolish it to make the paving on the driveway of his mansion :slight_smile:

Players would establish contracts during their play-time, build new bits of airport, run the airport just as they do today (only better of course). They logoff and “The Board” take over running the airport such as it needs. Perhaps flight planning, but operations too. “The Board” wouldn’t spend money perhaps, but CFO might be able to buy items to replace broken. Possibly, they can do contract negotiations - say the player puts the airport into “Vacation” mode. The airport, to outsiders and other AI, just becomes another AI airport. It continues to operate and provide services for other airports as though the player were still playing. Player comes back from Vacation and finds the airport more or less as left it with some money in the bank (although an airport run for too long by “The Board” will not prosper - the vacation mode should not be a route to riches but an option for when real life gets in the way.

Right, that’s a lot of words. Why do all this? Stickiness. Player stickiness. Get them coming back each day (several times per day) to see how the competition is doing. Write a HTML5 app for phone(s) to allow remote management decisions. Not “flight is running late, delay?” But maybe provide a contracts signing capability from mobile and other channels. I for one would do contracts sitting on my sofa in my living room through my smart TV or my tablet, or on the train to work in the morning, or evening home, or on the toilet (urghh!).

You can create daily, weekly competitions to entice player to be more competitive - a lot of these builder games are really single-player and most players don’t expect to fight. Whereas your typical tycoon game is all about the fight and not so interesting in the building bit. You can have both here. Prizes for most punctual airport, highest rated, you can have leaderboards, leagues and divisions.

How do you monetise this? Well, the game pays for a holiday or two for you, but the running of a service that remains sticky enough is your pension :slight_smile: I’ll take my 5% in BitCoin, alright? Advertising, of course. DLC for assets. The service itself may not need paying for by player - some might not mind couple of dollars/pounds/euros per month/quarter/annual. You could sell a year subscription in the game purchase price.

So, introduce AI driven competition and multi-human player in a persistent world that manages flights and contracts. Probably a bunch of other things that I haven’t thought of for sure.

Oh yeah, this is AirportCEO 2.0, of course

Thanks for reading if you stuck with it.

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Even that’s a great idea, but I think that this sounds a bit like a pay-to-ein game, a thing I personally don’t like. In Addition, fast-forwarding will be impossible though. Some aspects are great like airports from friends, but making a competitive game out of a creative one sounds not that great to me, to be honest.

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It’s a CEO game - how less competitive do you want it to be? It should be ruthless

The creative part is your airport planning and design. That would not even change.

Yes, fast-forwarding is an issue, for sure. It is a world running 24/7 - players would need to commit and play frequently or use the very clever (as yet none-existent) “The Board” to manage for them in their absence. “The Board” would never make anyone “win” - whatever win means. Win means to me, I’m the best CEO that there can be in the world of AirportCEO’s - I am measurably better in all aspects of CEO’ing (whatever they may be) than all the other players.

But it is easy to get to the top but a devil of a job harder to stay there.

I don’t see any “pay-to-win” concept. Play to win, yes but pay to win? How would that take shape? I agree I don’t like pay-to-win. I can’t imagine any hourly bonus to players for staying logged on, for example, that would give them some special “card” they could play to beat another player - no, no,no - that’s ugly.

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Competitive with an AI is totally fine because of difficulties. On the other hand, it’s quite complex to implement different difficulties while comparing airports with others. It would be great as a seperated game mode, so you can compete against other players or friends and have the opportunity to play for yourself.

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I’m not suggesting it replace the current single player game mode at all. This is optional extra. Might even be a DLC and then only those that care about it buy it. Buying the DLC gives access to servers, otherwise not allowed.

I’d like to exchange a couple of words you used if I may …

You said " …, it’s quite complex to implement …"

Can I rewrite that as " … it’s fiendishly difficult, if not next to impossible to implement …" :smiley:

But complexity is not something that cannot be overcome with good design and implementation. It’s just a matter of scope

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So then, your idea is really good, but before fantasising about multiplayer-features I’d like to have a great single player game.

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Oh yes, single player fantastic zero-defect all-signing all dancing first - yes, yes, no doubt.

I did say AirportCEO 2.0, remember?

Yes it is fantasy - but someone has to dream big dreams

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This IDEA is very appealing to me also.

and a paid for DLC at version 2.0 has merit the core game needs to be sorted out and nailed down first!!!

it could be a monthly / quartly sub as said.

just to increase slight how about i have started a post about Blueprints. they would be essential in such a concept.

also i believe that in this ‘DLC’ builders should not stay on site they should leave each day! unless you have qued enough building works to warrant having the building staff pull a night shift but even then they wages should reflect this.

once again i like this idea but core game nailed down first.

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Multiplayer feature request has been cleared denied many times by Devs before release. Search “Multiplayer” in the forum and you’ll see this has been suggested many times. The thing is that multiplayer doesn’t add much into the game.

But the efforts required to set it up is much more than the content it will add. The devs instead aim to keep adding more content in the game.

I agree with your arguments… But the fact is it would not be successful. There’s too much work required to set it up… and it will never become that popular. Before answering me, pls read the previous threads about it. A lot had been discussed on it and it clearly lacks interest.

This game is clearly not suitable for multiplayer.
Maybe when the Devs run out of content to add (2years from now?), Multiplayer could be considered… but again they would rather start working on a new game.

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And also there are some good web based airport management games for the feature you suggested. Google it up.
It looks like you are suggesting a game built on numbers and figures… not graphics.

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@NastyGamer
My forum searching skills are not good enough for sure and I took your advice and read those previous posts.

Couple of points:

  1. Facts are not known until hindsight has kicked it. It is impossible to say “But the fact is it would not be successful” unless you can know the future and if you do can you please share this weekend’s lottery numbers with us?

  2. You agree with my argument and then go on to destroy them. Weird, but ok. It’s almost conciliatory “there there sonny boy” before you kick the rug away. Be more consistent.

  3. You couldn’t have been more clearer in your re-iteration of the developers opinion on the matter however, so thanks for that. They, after all, are the ones to benefit financial from their hard efforts and if they don’t see the benefits (or are too closely involved with their pre-alpha stage and now alpha early access to see beyond getting something out of the door in a finished a state), that is a pity and a shame because a great opportunity is being missed here. It is hard in the middle of project to see beyond them, as the desire to get to the winning line is strong. Finish this bloody project, rest, pick up next project. Been doing that for 30 years in the software industry and it is tiring. But, in truth - and this is a fact as we all have experienced it every single day of our lives, the winning line keeps moving - forever. If you do not move with it you stagnate. Projects have natural ends and sometimes it is good to put everything in a box and say “I’m done”. But not if you’re a CEO :wink:

  4. CEO - I’m glad I mentioned that. The title of this game is AirportCEO. It should be called AirportArchitect - indeed that is the primary reason why I was even interested in this title in the 1st place. Building stuff. Building systems. Making functional and optimisation. All things that fascinate me as a software architect and I am satisfied in the abilities of AirportArchitect as it is even in it’s alpha state right now. I’m love to see lots of great stuff added to this game to make it a world leading game. Ok, it is a very niche area, but that is where fandom and communities come from (niches) - and every niche needs scratching :slight_smile:

  5. A CEO only function in life is to make money because money means power and CEO are megalomaniac who basically need to be told they are great every single moment by their sycophantic toadies - I have to do it all the time for my CEO. The CEO function in this game currently are not there - but will be for sure, I’ve no doubt. But, the mastabatory nature of single player empire building will not make any developer a fortune to make pension for life. It’ll make big bang couple of millions for nice holiday and house and the cashflow to start a new project and be in the same rut/place at the end of the next project. I know of what I speak here. I am currently on sabbatical from a world leading software vendor (business) that was very much like Apoapsis - founded by small handful of people 15 years ago and sold for $2.5 billion last year. Was the world’s leading software (in it’s niche little space, precisely like AirportCEO has the capability to become) and felt good about itself. Was very profitable, was great product, great people. CEO was not happy? Why? It was not the BEST software vendor in the world, so he took the risky venture to redevelop and promote a whole new platform - a SaaS platform (which, incidentally, and not without a little pride was my idea to him 12 years ago). We took 5 years to build the world’s 1st SaaS enabled business software of it’s class and now our CEO instead of having a HUGE sum of money in the accounts has a COLOSSAL sum of money in the accounts. He’s still not satisfied though. And why not, because he’s a CEO and he’s driven.

Please tell me that a CEO doesn’t care about data. Please, go on. That’s ALL he cares about and he only cares about the data as it pertains to his bottom line. Money.

A CEO game is not about design gameplay, unless you consider the design required to plot the downfall of your competitors - I’d call that PLANNING. An architectural game is about design (good graphics to use you term). AirportArchitect/CEO can be both of those things at the same time. But, you have no competition in ACEO currently and the best you are going to get in future release is a scripted AI running some balancing actions to make the game seem real. It’ll be done well and most people will be satisfied with it. They’ll bitch and moan but generally people will be happy or gravitate away from the game as it does not feel “real”. How many games have you thrown away because they AI didn’t seem real. Too many to count, so, how to make a real AI. Well, we can’t - we’ve tried. Back to my history. Our 1st use of the SaaS platform hardware we developed was to build a business AI engine to interpret people behaviour and habits mostly in the retail sector but also in other aspects of human nature. Do you know what we found - humans are smarter than all the computer horsepower we could throw at it. The DATA is huge and our ability to make machines learn was sorely lacking. AI is fiendishly difficult, but humans are awesome.

You need to capture the awesomeness of 1000’s, 10,000’s, 100,000’s of fanatical people who love playing AirportArchitect and channel that into a platform where they can COMPETE with each other. Then you got AirportCEO, until then you have an unfinished possibility. Good luck though in the niche world of single player glory.

Thanks for listening - I won’t pursue any further.

Still a good game despite what I say :slight_smile:

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