Route Marketing

[Unknown98]

It will be per day once it is enabled.

I know route marketing has had it's issues recently - thank you all for your patience. Last night the awareness did not calculate correctly for some airlines because the script that allocates the marketing funds to the routes did not finish running before the script that calculates the route awareness. I have added more buffer space between the two scripts so that should not happen tonight. I also made improvements to the efficiency of the script so maybe I can shorten the maintenance window a bit, we'll see.

Starting from tomorrow the game will store two awareness values for your routes - the "base" awareness (without marketing effect) and the awareness boost you are getting from your marketing. You will be able to see these two values on the route marketing page, so you can check how your marketing is affecting the awareness of each route.

[lolliftw]

I had some suggestions, previous placed on the discord but I think it got bumped up too quickly.

1) Route awareness should be affected by your airline's awareness? Not just simply a faster growth rate but also a starting boost may help. Considering the current way, it gives airlines absolutely no reason to boost their airline awareness, which makes the thing redundant. However, in reality, branded airlines would definitely have it slightly easier when launching flights as compared to not so popular airlines.
2) An airline's presence in a country should help it when it launches new routes. Even better still, an airline shouldn't need to market so much if it is flying between 2 cities it is already flying too. (For instance, you don't need much marketing if you have flights in Atlanta, flights in Detroit, and you are simply launching a new route between Atlanta and Detroit.) Probably this may be more difficult to implement, but seriously this is more reflective as often airline's spend their marketing on new markets or when flying to new cities within the country.

[Unknown98]

1) I was thinking of starting new route's awareness at 25% of the airline awareness. Just need to fix route marketing so it works correctly as-is before I go adding even more to it. But yes I agree

2) That would be a bit more difficult to do.. don't want to say it's impossible. Maybe put it in the issue tracker for future reference?

[gaff85]

Im seeing an issues with the route marketing, if you have setup and the route hits, 100%, it does not allow you to remove the marketing, if visually removes it, but once you save the page it re-appears, I was under the impression if it hit 100% marketing was no longer required.

[Unknown98]

It increases the rate at which awareness grows - you want to look at the base awareness. Once that hits 100% you are safe to completely remove route marketing without having a drop in route awareness.


Additionally I just fixed a bug where newly created routes would not adopt the correct awareness levels. For instance if you have a PHL-JFK route, and you create a new route that includes PHL-JFK, both routes should have the exact same route awareness. That was previously not happening. This was also causing some routes to incorrectly display "0" for base awareness on the route marketing page.

[Unknown98]

Just an update - route marketing is still free as of right now, and will continue to be free until I get back from vacation in early September. Once I have a firm date to enable the charging of route marketing I will send out an in-game PM as well as post it here and on discord a couple days in advance.