How a Trial Account Can Destroy Your Airline (And Support is on Vacation Day #19)

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Hi everyone,

I wanted to bring a critical issue to the attention of the whole community, as it exposes a massive loophole that affects all of us who pay to play on these servers.

Recently, a clearly fake account on a trial period started operating with the sole purpose of targeting and damaging my airline. They are aggressively dumping prices at more than 50% off the normal market rates. This is obviously a competitor or a troll using a burner account to ruin the local economy and sabotage legitimate players.

I immediately reported this unfair practice to Support, expecting a swift intervention given that we are on a premium, paid server. The response I received? “The team is currently on vacation.”

No emergency moderation, no temporary suspension of the malicious account, nothing. I was just left on read.

Here is the problem: we pay for our servers 365 days a year. Our subscription costs don’t go on vacation when the support team does. It is frankly unacceptable that a troll can exploit a free trial to bypass fair competition and destroy legitimate airlines, while the administration is completely unreachable for days (19 today).

Has anyone else experienced this kind of abuse from trial accounts? I think it’s time we demand stricter protections against trial-period exploits and ask for a basic level of emergency support.

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Hi

while I hear your frustration, I have to wonder how small your niche is that one account can completely destroy your airline.

Again, I hear your frustration. I am just having a hard time seeing this as a systemic issue for any well set-up airline of a few weeks or months age.

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Hi Mordi, rest assured that we are prepared to respond to emergencies even while I (the sole team member working on AirlineSim) am on vacation. But as @yukawa already suggested, I don’t see an actual emergency in your case. A trial account works with very limited budget and is limited to 60 credits of game time. If such an account can seriously hurt your business, any player could - legitimate or not.

That said, I will of course look into allegations of multi-accounting or trolling now that I am back in the office.

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Are you sure that it is a trial account?

I had a look into your airline in Domination. Indeed there is an airline with a questionable name, but it seems not to be a trial account. If you click on the username/managing director you see that the status is “premium”.

So from my point of view it’s a legit competitor but with a questionable troll name