Runway Bottleneck

General discussion
1

Hi There,

I’m a longtime player of WoA. Allthough I love the game I have something that has bugged me ever since I started playing, even in v1.0.

During early/mid game the airports are well balanced. Planes are on final and taking off at a steady pace.

For each runway at about lvl20 there is a turning point where you accept enough contracts to have the planes on final exceed the processing pace of the airport, causing you to be landing planes indefinitely without having spare room to do takeoffs.

That would be fine on a full house but some remarks:

  • This issue arises when nearly 30% of all available stalls are filled. All other stalls just serve as a placeholder for planes still on final.

  • Once planes have finished processing in time, time has no effect anymore. Even if they sit at takeoff queue for hours.

  • The game completely resets the planes ready for takeoff when quitted and restarted.

So that brings my incentive to perform takeoffs to nearly zero. The game isn’t forcing you to perform them. Strictly speaking in an actual airport planes on final have the utmost priority so I’m technically playing the game as it should.

Funny thing is, I consider it a bug, as soon as the plane has been pushed back, it already “departs” even though it didn’t take off yet.
This causes for a hilarious scene where I can see the airplane returning while it still being queued for takeoff.

I’ve attached some screenshots.
Here are screenshots of:

  • the absurdity of the takeoff queue. Please note that this is instantly gone when quitting the app.
  • the selected plane in the takeoff queue
  • the very same plane on the map returning in 2mins :rofl: the screenshot is taken at the same time.

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I guess what I would like:

  • A way to balance out landing planes vs available stalls. Let them land faster, upgrade runway, take risks having them land short, add runways, …?

  • a reason to complete takoff. Having them persistent during app reboots will help!

Hope the devs will pick up on this.

Regards,
Furbendji

6 Likes
2

the upcoming tower agent will alleviate a little of this. I know, I’m testing it. but it won’t solve the problem. The devs have not seen fit to look at this since day 1, even with the switch to 2.0, so I don’t see them planning to do it now to be honest. Too many other priorities to work on and it’s only a team of 5.

As for the comment

Funny thing is, I consider it a bug, as soon as the plane has been pushed back, it already “departs” even though it didn’t take off yet.

Actually this mirrors real life. A departure time is when the aircraft leaves the gate. NOT when it takes off. BOS is a prime example where it can be 20 minutes sometimes between leaving the gate and getting off the ground, but the time ALWAYS starts when the aircraft leaves the gate, so this is not a bug.
Now for the seeing the return aircraft, that’s been caused by the acceleration from real life time to 3X… that’s a function that the devs decided to change themselves to speed up the overall game play. Their call as to whether it returns, but so far i’ve seen and heard no indication that they are thinking of that. Although i might yet be surprised.

4 Likes
3

I hope that the situation will not return when the time started to run when the plane was parked on the stand. When there were no free handlers, there were delayed departures.

a possible solution would be if the time would start when pushing back and if the player managed it within the limit, then the reward would be, for example, 1XP

1 Like
4

Timing starts when you select start handling and finishes when you select finish handling. With the current game construct I do not believe there is any intention to change that

5

Hi Calsberg,

Thank you for your reply.
You are absolutely right about the real life aspect of the time starts after the aircraft leaves the gates.

However what would be logical is that an airplane still incurs delay. As the situation is now I can perfectly handle an airplane in time and leave it stranded on the runup for days and it will still show on-time.

As the airplanes disappear on each game shutdown I have no reason to let them go to takeoff, especially as the runway is already congested with landings only.

If I play for a few hours on end and I went through all my contracts I can just let an airplane take off and it will land back again immediately, because its yourney was already completed in the simulation. Which makes no sense at all i mean.

I want to have:

  • a way to not be congested at landing (for example we can have 20 boarding equipment but i cannot even have 20 aircrafts simultaneously in the gates due to runway congestions.

  • the game forcing me to issue takeoffs in exchange for a late penalty

6

Well delays because of no free handlers sounds logical to me. Can you elaborate your point?

7

Tower agent will help, trust me

3 Likes
8

In the earlier version, the time started running immediately after parking on the stand. Now only after the activation of the hendlinger. So the player had to watch when he let the plane land.

9

I’m really looking forward to it :sunglasses: