Feedback "Open letter" about the state of the game (to Flight-Attendant)

Dear Skyrama Community and most of all Flight-Attendant,
First of all, I would like to thank you for everyone in the community for still being the only actual active staff member, at least here on the forum. I'm aware of -Controller- still reading the forum, but sadly he isn't really engaging too much with the community, tho special hello to you as well if you are reading this! xD

I've decided to write this open "letter" as I've recently returned to Skyrama as well and had pretty mixed feelings about it. The game hasn't received a single feature update for years now, which is obviously underwhelming for the community. I think that a lot of people were really looking forward to the "The future is approaching" announcement and were heavily disappointed by it being simply just boring and a lazy level increase to 200, which also isn’t perfect as level 93 requires „-1863000000 XP“ due to the int overflow, if I had to take an educated guess. Funnily enough, this doesn’t seem to be an issue with the new levels that most likely use other data type to store the number of required XP. The only weird thing is that the further you get, the less XP you require, but that’s not the point really. I think most people were hoping for an actual feature update for the game with this announcement. It was hyped here on the forum as something revolutionary, so either you actually had something more planned but decided against it in the end, or just did the most unnecessary teasing in the history of Bigpoint.

I'm aware that Skyrama is written in legacy Flash (ActionScript 3.0 I believe) and it must be really hard to create new content for it or even maintain it properly so let me get to the main point of the post, I would like to ask for actual transparency from your part for the community. How many people are contributing to Skyrama at this moment (actively at least to some degree) and what are the plans for the game into the future? I know that answer to this question might hurt Bigpoint's financial situation but on the other hand it could help them as well, is there any future plan for an actual feature update or is the game gonna continue being maintained only with critical bug fixes, or is the plan to abandon the game and shut it down in some period of time? I know for a fact that Bigpoint is still earning money from the microtransactions, which is great and I'm glad for Bigpoint, however I'm sure that you are also not blind and can see the frustration from active players with the lack of any new content.

I'm sure you are thinking what the heck does this guy even know about this game and that it isn't as easy as it might seem, however I really do understand that it isn't as easy as it can sound and don't want to make it sound that way. That's why I'm not even asking if there's ever gonna be a port to Unity or similar engine as I know how time-consuming that would be and I'm pretty sure it was done only with Farmerama, which I'm still kinda surprised with how hard it must be to still have people around who are willing to work with action scripts of flash in general. Huge kudos to those developers, big respect!

My request is really pretty simple, we are not the biggest community anymore and you (Flight-Attendant) are the only one actually communicating with the community to some degree (which is amazing as I've stated before). I ask you to really be more engaged and open with the community about the game's state, if it doesn't mean problems from your higher-ups, obviously. I would love to address the Community Team directly, but I'm pretty sure they haven't read this forum for weeks, if not months, so that's why I at least appreciate you still taking care of it here.

You might be asking what kind of feature update players would want that would be easy to implement? I think that the easiest thing the development team could do is increasing the grid zone. It's really just copy pasting like 6 lines in JSON files and changing it's price (possibly making the previous levels cheaper?). I believe this could really be not that hard for implementation, and I would like to believe that it shouldn't have any side effects on the current player profiles.

I feel like it is also important to point out some currently known bugs in Skyrama. Some community members were bit "rage-baited" by your statement citing "the game hasn't been running as well as it is now for years, and they're still working on it!" as there is for months now an issue with Fly-bys, there seem to be an issue on the server-side with the response from "planes.createFlyBy" command that returns after like 2-3 flybys response "No Unique Key available" that crashes the game. I suppose it could be caused by the huge amount of data stored in the skyrama database but maybe I'm wrong, that's really just a guess although it would be really nice if the developers (developer?) could look at it or give a transparent response why this issue is so hard to resolve, I think it's no shame to say that the code is really old and legacy and there might be some issue with the amount of data stored, no one would blame Bigpoint or the developers for an honest response like that. There is also the bug where crafting only part of the L-sized plane resets the progress. It would also be amazing to potentially address that issue in the future.

I'm also aware that there were meant to be some kind of "expeditions" in Skyrama, has this idea been completely scrapped? It was linked with "zeppelins", if it was actually scrapped long time ago, could we at least know what would it be about? Would be interesting to know!
Me and many others are still really thankful to Bigpoint, for keeping the game alive at least as it is and I hope this "open letter" didn't insult anyone in any way and is gonna be taken only in positive matter! A lot of players still really enjoy Skyrama and care a lot about it so it's absolutely amazing that we can still play it even 14 years after it's launch!

I'm open to any further discussion in the comments or privately in the DMs about anything related to this topic and I hope it can bring some sort of understanding between the players and Bigpoint itself. ^^

Gonna be looking forward to your answer, Flight-Attendant, and I hope you and everyone in the Skyrama community have a wonderful day! <3
- bulva2 (concerned airport manager )

 

Hello bulva2,

My colleague, the controller, and I also work together in the German forum. We do this in our free time, and currently I can devote more time to these things than my colleague. Even if he doesn't post here, that doesn't mean he doesn't do anything.

Unfortunately, there's still an error in the entire levelling history, meaning that most accounts have been converted, but unfortunately not all. As a result, the converted accounts require less XP to level. We're still investigating the issue, so a new level list can't be released yet.

The game is not being abandoned, as you can see that there are also some new aircraft, as well as the level expansion.

But you can't add anything new until the actual bugs in the game have been fixed.

• Level adjustment
  
• Traffic light problem
  
• Buddy point problem
  
• Flyby problem, to name just a few.

As you already wrote, the game runs on the outdated Flash standard. As far as we have been told, the coding is so complex that it cannot be converted to Unity like Farmerama.

The evaluation of the mood and the players' requests is collected and shared from both forums. One request, for example, was for shorter recycling times, which has already been implemented. However, larger projects require more time and, above all, a game without major bugs.

I don't think the playing field will be enlarged, as not every player has a huge screen and probably already has trouble displaying the entire playing field. We'll pass this on, though.

So, looking at the past few years, the game has been running significantly better since switching to PHP7 in January 2023, even though we had weeks of downtime afterward until everything worked. The problem with the flybys has been there almost forever.

If you have problems crafting L-planes, you can contact support. This is also a bug that has existed since the introduction of the assembly hall and has been forwarded.

The "Zeppelins" idea has been scrapped; currently, they're trying to fix the existing bugs, because only then can they possibly incorporate or expand new features. But as already mentioned, this isn't quite so easy given the code.

There will be no direct communication with Bigpoint. We are your contact here and will forward everything

• Ideas
  
• Problems
  
• Wishes
  
• Complaints etc.

directly, but we can only answer based on what we know ourselves.


Kind regards,
Flight-Attendant

Edit: There is also the following new Announcement!

 

Hello Flight-Attendant,

Thank you for your quick reply. First of all, I would like to apologize if the comment about your colleague the Controller, sounded in any way rude towards him. I didn't mean to make it sound like he is doing nothing. I was sure that he was doing other stuff, just not being the one communicating here on the EN forum, just wanted to clear that one out!

Sorry to hear about the issue with the XP system, I'm thankful for the transparency about the issue. I know that some codebase issues can really be super tough to debug, and it's even harder with A HUGE database of players like you've got, you simply cannot risk corrupting the player profiles in any way, which is understandable. Don't worry about the level list too much, we are aware of how many XP every level currently needs on a new account, don't underestimate the determined community. xD Someone in the community managed to gather it already.

I completely understand that you cannot work on new content until the important stuff are resolved there was just rising worry that the game might get abandoned completely and end-up having the same faith as for example Rising Cities had, that was the biggest reason for me to write this message on behalf of the Skyrama community on Discord that I'm a part of but also many other active Skyrama members that play the game and I'm more than happy to hear that you haven't given up on it!

About the grid zone, thanks for forwarding that one to the team, yeah I understand the concern about the display size, however I think that the most active Skyrama members won't have an issue with moving their cursor a bit or zooming out a bit more if necessary. My bigger concern would be a higher amount of data being POSTed to the server-side, but when Skyrama can handle 6500 inbound/outbound airplanes, I'm sure it could handle this one.

I must admit that I didn't know about the switch to PHP7 (on server-side I suppose) but I'm glad it helped with the performance and yeah the downtime is understandable, glad that the team managed to sort that one out!

Obviously, I've read the announcement that you have sent, and it really sounds promising, and you most likely made a lot of people really happy and hopeful today. This was exactly what I meant! It's great to hear that the company is not yet ready to give up on Skyrama. Please continue posting even small posts about any progress, even if potentially not that significant, it gives the community hope and reason to continue playing! I'm sure that more than one table in the office felt the pain when going through the old documentation but let the development team know that if they ever need a morale boost that they can find it here in the Skyrama community. It would be amazing if you could forward a big thank you to everyone who is still participating on the project and I'm sending them strong nerves with the legacy code.

Thank you for listening to the feedback, and I'm sure that many players are willing and ready to help in any form of testing or any other form of help we can offer as players!

Wish you a great rest of the day,
bulva2

 

Now we're giving feedback anyways: I might have something to add that bothers me for a while now.

It's amazing we're getting new planes after all those years. I'm definitely not going to complain about it, but if there's one thing I dislike about those new planes, it's their names. Names like "D1SC0-LOon" or "COL-S2" just aren't that attracting and hard to remember.

For the names in the style of the first one, I'd prefer it much more if it would simply be called "Disco-Loon" rather than with the numbers and capitals. But that might just be me? That the planes are mostly being recolored from existing planes is unfortunate, but I can live with it if it doesn't happen too often.

As for the level update: I wonder how hard it can be to make the level star icon a little bigger so that the font can be bigger as well? I don't want to be rude towards the developers, but I've worked with Flash before as a hobby and I can honestly not understand the problem there. I don't know how Skyrama works behind the scenes, of course, that might have to do with it a lot.

On the other hand: thank you for your message! It's nice to hear that there's again a full team on Skyrama, I can't wait to see what comes in hopefully not too long.

 

We are waiting for next news

 

Hi bulva2 and flight-attendant thank's for great news its nice to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Best regards Robert AKA besse

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and a big thanks to BrideElena for showing me how to get back to the forum.best regards besse.


Edit Flight-Attendant: Posts merged, please use the edit function to add something to your post, thanks.