I logged on to do a real world replication today, and had another pilot telling me that he wasn’t happy and though he could he wasn’t going to force me to change mine. It went on and on, I almost called a SUP, but after the barrage of PMs I decided to log off.
His main claim was that there was an organised event which I was duty bound to know about, and that I cannot use a callsign that had been claimed/reserved in the booking system.
So how does a pilot know that any callsign has been reserved for an event?
No, callsigns are used on a “first come, first served” basis and this is still valid. It is, of course, a nice gesture to change callsign if somebody asks in a genuinely nice way and I am sure you would have done this as well, had the pilot in question asked you nicely. If people demand this, I would not surrender the callsign as well. The excuse “oh, it is an event with fixed callsigns” does not count, as flights are logged with our VATSIM IDs, so there’s no reason to use an exact callsign to have a flight logged correctly.
Next time please call a SUP so the other pilot learns and understands that he’s got no right to demand a flight number/callsign.
Much the same applies to gates. I once had another pilot spawn on top of me and said I had to move because <other pilot’s callsign> used that gate in the real world. Other pilot also tried to tell the ground controller the same thing before eventually disconnecting.
So why do events ask pilots to use a callsign to book a slot, if that callsign is not reserved for them. Seems like the system is supporting the belief that they are reserved.
I guess that there’s an assumption that members know basic rules and do not stress out about callsigns. In your case the other pilot could have logged in as QFA19A (actually, someone else was using this callsign, too ) or as QFA19B.
) or as QFA19B.