I have raised this before but as we are getting closer to the start of feature voting again I think that this is something the needs to be considered.
Looking through steam reviews a lot of the criticism has (unfairly) been about the length of time it has taken for new features to be introduced. While I don’t agree with this as a criticism I believe that a free vote on new features might not be the best way to progress.
My proposal would be that the devs make a shortlist of ideas to move forward based on an assessment of the time it would take to implement and the benefit it will bring to the game’s progression. The ideas would be from the community but the scope of options would be restricted.
For example if a free vote would result in let’s say airport hubs being the next feature to be implemented this might please some players but the wider player base might be left out as the their is a realism focus on forum members. Not a criticism of the idea of hubs just maybe not the next necessary item.
I predict that once multifloor is a feature if we don’t get more items for passengers to interact with, especially arriving passengers, the next set of steam reviews will just be critical of the empty boxes that you can build with nothing to put in them.
This is also true of the move realistic immigration rules based on destination as a feature. As some people have requested they want feee travel area (ie shengan), international and domestic. While this would be great it would mean that every passenger would need a nationality, coding would have to know where your airport was a where people from all the nationalities would have to queue and probably need new sprites for each nations travel docs. This would be time consuming even for an AAA game let alone an indie developer.
Steam reviews matter to us all as the devs need new players to find and download the game to keep making money to keep adding features so I am just floating the idea of a bit more central control to make sure that game goes on and on and we all get what we want in the end.
