We had two kinds of questions coming in over the last couple of days: “When will testing begin on Croydon?” and “Why can’t I sign up with the game?”. So we thought about how we could answer both of them and came to a conclusion: The new flight rating system will be the last big addition to 1.3 and we want it to be stable and balanced when it’s rolled out. But at the same time we don’t want our fans to be kept from playing because Nicosia is full. Consequently we decided that we will go ahead with the launch of Croydon based on a proven version of the game — namely 1.3.21b –  that’s already running on Nicosia. The recently announced test with real life data from Nicosia will be postponed until we are actually happy with the flight rating system and until we are confident that we can introduce it on existing servers without causing too many turbulences.

So now you’re probably wondering about a launch date? Well, here it is: Monday, November 9th, 2009. The configuration will be more or less the same as on Nicosia, but will include some data patches concerning airport data and maybe some fixes to the aircraft database.

Most of you have probably already seen some of the screenshots of the new flight rating system. While these changes sure look nice they also lead to some major disturbance in a running game world. All flights will be rated differently and the booking behaviour of the virtual passengers might change considerably.

Due to this we will do some large scale testing before we introduce the patch on Nicosia. The German community is already familiar with this process: We take all the live data from Nicosia, import it into AirlineSim on our new server Croydon and deactivate credit costs for the system. Within about 24 hours the server will show up in your Aquila dashboard. If you had an account on Nicosia before you will be able to access Croydon and see how the new patch affects your existing airline and its operations.

We will transfer the data sometime today and testing is supposed to last at least one week. Please note that the patch will delete all your booked in flights. They will be re-entered into the system to update the flight ratings but will be empty. Also some flights might be cancelled because the aircraft are left at wrong airports after the update. Please keep these issues in mind, especially for the actual patch we will be announcing in time.

As tests with data from a German game server have shown, you’ll be able to see dependable figures after about 4 to 5 days the latest as that’s when your company’s image has formed and the booking cycle is running regularly again.

EDIT: We will postpone the test for at least one or two days as we want to do some more tweaking before letting the beast into the wild.

EDIT 2: Still working on some tuning which will probably take another week. We try to get it done as soon as possible.

Nicosia was patched to the latest version just a few minutes ago. On top of that we prepared a new update for Aquila, our central account management platform. Primarily this update consists of two new features: A recommendation feature which allows you to tell a friend about AirlineSim and thereby earn free credits as well a long anticipated account deactivation feature. Please note that both new addons are still in testing, so please report any bugs or problems you may encounter to support@airlinesim.aero. You can find the complete list of AirlineSim changes after the break.

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