What?
Rather than having a global auction house for aircraft, the aircraft market is remodelled more akin to how it works in the real world, where airlines would typically search for and sell aircraft via brokers. Some (but possibly not all) aircraft offers would still be listed somewhere for “immediate purchase”. But such purchases would happen based on fixed conditions set by the respective broker.
Consequently, it would be possible to task a broker - for a fee - with finding and possibly acquiring aircraft matching certain criteria, even if those aren’t available and/or listed on the market yet. Naturally, the opposite applies as well and an airline could task a broker with selling frames it no longer has a need for.
Brokers would (at least initially) be NPCs (meaning: controlled by the game, not a human) and there would be several of them in the game, each of them operating with slightly different “profiles”…some brokers might have a more optimistic outlook on the economy, others a more conservative one. Some might specialise in certain regions of the world, others in particular manufacturers or market segments. Either way, how prices are determined and buyers and sellers are matched stays a blackbox to players, at least to some extend.
As a side-effect, brokers can be “instrumentalised for game design purposes” for example by letting them pitch immediate and/or particularly attractive offers to new airlines, thereby supporting new players in a way that feels natural.
More or less direct player-to-player trades will still be possible in some way, but can and will be tightly regulated. Just as it’s the case today, but more transparently.
Why?
The current auction-based market suffers from the same fundamental issues as the stock market: There is far too little liquidity in the market to really make it work (as in: find actual market prices). As a consequence, more and more rules have been introduced over the years to avoid exploitation, which lead to a market so constrained that it hardly deserves the name.
One such constraint that’s particularly annoying is the blocking of funds after a bid. It makes sense from an anti-cheat perspective, but it’s annoying to experienced players and outright dangerous to new ones, often causing frustration and airlines being deleted due to having all their funds tight up for days on end.
When?
TBD