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 the screenshot is taken at the same time.
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.
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
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
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
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.
Indeed the introduction of the tower agent helpt alleviate this issue in the first moments of the game.
But now >lvl50 i face the same issue.
Two things are working together to bother my gameplay:
Planes that are queueing for takeoff are simply gone by restarting the game
My landing airplanes have a landing speed of let’s say 1 airplane per minute. (fictional numbers). Every 20minutes minutes handling finishes on a plane. I have 40 stalls so my planes never land fast enough to occupy all my stalls ever by design.
So I’m inclined to not spend precious runway time for taking off airplanes, as the landing plane periodicity is the bottleneck of everything.
So they never take off and I have a queue of more then 60 airplanes. By that time i’ve been playing for an hour, quit the game and all my problems are gone.
Whilst helping my case this is breaking gameplay a little.
Are the devs aware of this?
Is there another player agreeing with me?
Agree and thats the only reason why my LHR contracts are always below 150. But at the same time I cant see any feasible way in which this can be sorted.
I mean what shall be changed?? Coz if the landing speeds are increased like 2 times, it will look soo unrealistic.
As for takeoffs yea maybe a timer can be added saying that after departure from gate the plane must be airborne in X mins. But then it will only end up worsening the runway congestion mentioned in the earlier post and make it worse at one runway airports.
I understand the issue but instead of just talking about the issue, a feasible solution plan should also be provided by us.
IDK about everyone else but the landing queue isn’t really that far off from real life. The planes act relatively realistic on arrivals/departures.
The only reason it seems like they’re leaking forever is because of how short handling times are, as they’ve been expedited to get planes out quicker but they pile up after pushback. And I don’t know if anyone else feels this but how fast the day/night time goes by in the game also plays a role IMO.
But we might have to learn to live with it as I don’t think that’s a priority right now. Just have to find a way around it that works for you to make the game enjoyable personally.
I actually agree with your deadline of having the plane NEED to take of after a certain time.
It will worsen the amount of planes that can be handled simultaniously BUT I’ll gain gameplay by needing to calculate and being able to make mistakes or have to juggle planes, which makes a game more fun
On one side I wouldn’t change the speed for landing but the moment when planes enter taxi speed on the runway should be delayed until they really have left the runway. This is something that you have in real operations also. Take the 610-stands at LHR where cargo planes are crawling on the runway for about a minute, this is really slowing things down. I also can think of let landing planes appear earlier on final approach, not when the prior plane is already way out on the taxiway. This happens for starting planes way faster so I never had a bigger queue at LHR at the waiting points.
Another thing would be more realistic flight times and handling times. This would put more life on the airport itself and you can minimize the queue of planes waiting for landing. In another post I’ve suggested this as an optional feature that you can activate in settings so that you don’t get bored at the early stages of playing while players with more contracts and money could use more stands and don’t have this arrival bottleneck.
I don’t know how easy those things could be implemented into the game maybe devs can share their point on that.
the screenshot is taken at the same time.
