Towns can have a mayor now, villages still can't
Yesterday we started counting visits to any populated place in the world, not only to the cities in our own list. Fly three minutes over a village and it goes into your collection. That part worked, but it left a gap in the race for the mayor's seat. Only cities from our original list could have a mayor, so a pilot who kept coming back to Cuxhaven or Bremerhaven could build up days there and still never get the seat.
From today, places that OpenStreetMap marks as a town or a city take part in the race. You earn the seat the same way as anywhere else: reach tier II there (three visit days) and lead on tiers. If someone already holds it, you have to pass them. A tie keeps the current mayor.
Villages and hamlets stay out of the race. You still collect them, they still count toward your city tiers and achievements, and they show up on your profile and on /my/cities. They just don't get a crown, a line in the live feed, or a post in Discord. The reason is simple. There are hundreds of thousands of villages in that layer, and most of them will only ever see one pilot. A seat that nobody else can contest is a free title, and a feed full of "new mayor of a hamlet nobody has heard of" would bury the seats people actually fight over.
A few practical notes:
- The class comes from the map data at the moment you fly over the place, so
the game learns it from your visit. If you visited a town before today, it joins the race the next time anyone flies there. Your earlier days still count toward the tier.
- Two villages with the same name in the same country still share one entry.
That was true yesterday too, and it matters less now that villages have no seat.
- Nothing changed for airports and regions. Every airport with a page and
every region already had a captain or a governor.
The full table of who holds what is on the mayors page. If you want to understand how the race works, start with the race for the seat, and for what counts as a place at all, read every village counts.
If you think a place is classed wrongly, the fix belongs in OpenStreetMap, and we pick it up when the map tiles refresh. Tell us in Discord either way.