Just a few quick thoughts on how to improve long-term playability on unrestricted servers without getting pointlessly complicated:
The game uses a pretty sophisticated system to deal with the issues of old aircraft: They face greatly increased maintenance costs and lower image ratings, which both reduces profits and faces big challenges to address. Unfortunately, the rate of aircraft aging is extremely slow because it's 1:1 with the real life. If you are using freshly ordered aircraft, you are unlikely to ever run into those issues as they are so absurdly far away in time. You would never need to replace the aircraft because they would become unprofitable or unpopular over time.
However, the business in AS is modelled to allow for much faster growth than in real life. This means that at some time, you earn shedloads of money without ever having a need to spend it. Money just piles up endlessly so you just wait for newcomers to open up a new airline so you can crush them to the ground. :mellow:
Imagine that aircraft would age much quicker, for example one full year in just a month. Aircraft, now set up at 24 years for write-off, would be written off after just two years. An airline which uses its aircraft for three real life years would need to face the issues of a 36 year old plane. Airlines would need to address the replacement of aircraft, and of course, the more aircraft they have, the more money they would need to burn in that process. New airlines could go two ways to attack large airlines: One, take the old and extremely cheap aircraft that large airlines dump on the used market. Two, begin with shiny fresh aircraft and compete against the more and more heavily deteriorating fleets of the opponents. Used aircraft not acquired by anyone after a certain amount of time could be taken from the market and be scrapped to prevent a flooding of the used market. This could also make the aircraft market more interesting for servers which do not have old aircraft types available.
One airline which does nothing for a long time would see its profits disappear due to exploding maintenance costs and decreasing bookings due to their worse and worse becoming image ratings. The constant need to replace aircraft would stop large airlines to pile up giant sums of money because they have to constantly replace their fleets. It wouldn't even be too tedious to do this, as flight plans can be easily transferred.
And how would you plan to deal with players who spent 10 years building their airlines who would be forced off the market within a year because you simply cannot replace 1000 aircraft every 2 month? I am talking about an average skilled player (no kraken) who after 2-3 years playing gets to reach 1000 aircraft without much trouble. Are you going to refund all those players their money spent on credits + time spent on AS at at least a minimum wage rate? Sorry to say but this idea is as silly as it can ever get.
I think, he was making a point a general, and wasn’t addressing the implementation on existing servers.
Personally, I think it is a good idea, however, I think people would simply only go for leasing. This would still impose a certain limit as only a certain number of planes can be ordered, but that number is quite high.
Given, that in real life, there is a restriction on this, I believe this to be a viable idea you can work on.
Just to make clear, my sarcastic comment was not meant against @khoianh himself. I actually quite like his posts in general. It was in regards to this very specific proposal only.
My idea is to increase the labor costs of maintenance exponentially as fleet size increase.
For example, 1 plane would need a maintenance crew of 5…not so bad.
10 planes would need 75 instead of the expected 50. This could be the simulated reflection of needing to station maintenance crews in a couple cities.
50 planes could require 1000 maintainers, 100 planes would need 10000, since now we need maintenance crews in many cities around the clock.
The numbers could grow harshly from there and be adjusted for balance. The goal is to simulate the crushing expense and management of far flung maintenance. This would also end the 10000 fleet size nonsense.
Those who are mediocre and are unable to compete try to prevent and force artificial regulation and restrictions on those who are successful. Like in raal life LOL. Are you a communist by political allegiance, Yeva5309?
No I’m not, but certainly you must see that the gigantic bloated fleets aren’t realistic. I think the problem lies in the fact that a lot of the real life overhead isn’t simulated. Real life maintenance (A B C D checks, maintenance airfields, forced rotation of planes, and equipment failures) are really taxing to simulate, hard on the players due to micromanagement, and probably not fun to play out in game. So those costs need to be simulated in a more abstract way. Airline sim tries that, but obviously it’s not expensive enough. And in real life costs do increase exponentially, not linearly as they seem to in game.
Those who are mediocre and are unable to compete try to prevent and force artificial regulation and restrictions on those who are successful. Like in raal life LOL.
Those who are established and unable to react to changes try to prevent and force regulations in their favour to keep competition out. Like in real life. ;)
The game is still in development, and it will change over time. I honestly believe the developers do read these forums, so I feel it is helpful to debate ideas here in the hopes that the developers grab and use the best ideas from us.
The issue for this idea is your are also preventing people from running old aircraft or aircraft no longer in production. The year aircraft is manufactured doesn't have this ratio applied, so you will get a huge ageing factor for some old aircraft. A simple way to put this is one of the aircraft i run is a MD88 with 21.3 yr. By applying your factor of 12, it will be 255 yr. hope i can have an aircraft with this age in real life :P. This idea at least doesn't work on older servers with out-of-production aircraft.
I think maintenance is not really place you can change to address company being too large. Someone can even argue that in real life, you could have your own maintenance shop, like Delta, to solve aircraft with maintenance on ageing fleet. They might need to buy some aircraft with same type for spare parts, but it's not really a cost you can fix by multiple a factor on maintenance cost. ;)
While in general I do like the idea, I think the x12 factor might be a bit on the high side. There is certainly an unbalance between the aircraft aging and the revenue side. A week in the game is not simulating a week in real life (probably more like a month, or even a quarter).
As TWAAir stated, it would phase out legacy aircraft much faster and thus impacting game play for a number of players. We also might have to look at aircraft production times, cos at a certain level, you might even not be able to replace your fleet anymore in time, as new deliveries take longer than replacements might be required, but I guess that is anyway a very high number, so maybe not relevant.
Regarding compensations for existing players. You HAD your fun, and that’s what you paid for. You won’t get any compensation for that. And your previous payments are not carry forward amounts for future guarantees. You pay to play for that specific “moment”. You have no guaranteed protection of your investments. Of course, a business man (like Martin) will consider his existing (and best) clients, but it is not that you have any written “right” to that. The framework is ever changing and businesses have to adapt to those changes. That’s part of what defines success and, in my personal opinion, could be reflected here a bit more as well. I believe, the game play is too static over time and would benefit from some noise (changes in the framework, random fluctuations in short term demand, random weather induced limitations, etc.)
No this is not a good Idea at all - keep it realistic stop messing around with runways, slots, aircraft aging times. Lets try and get the best and most realistic game going and not go into a world of fake sim like the others.
The main problem with this game is airlines can grow massively and monopolize markets making it difficult for airlines to start in older game worlds. Lets focus on why this is.
Fundamentally - its too easy to make money fast and then continue to make money. My only issue with this game is how PAX work. PAX in real life drive a bargain, making profits low and demand go all over the place. The current system whereby the ORS rating determines whether PAX choses a flight and then you can charge 150% more than a competitor despite them having a perfectly good alternative to the major player with the best ORS rating.
This is why in the real world you can have major airlines not making any money due to the demand and yeilds being low. For example, in Atlanta 84% of Deltas connecting flights using regional aircraft barely break even. Its the longhaul and High yield routes that make them the money.
For example, in Atlanta 84% of Deltas connecting flights using regional aircraft barely break even. Its the longhaul and High yield routes that make them the money.
Unless you provide a verifiable proof, it’s just a number you’ve just made up for the sake of your own argument.
While this would give new players some sort of edge it does force them to buy very expensive new planes versus giving new players the opportunity to fly older planes that are cheaper and we would end up with only airlines with 737 or A320's losing any sort of character. This would hamper any sort of airline wanting to fly say 757's or 767 as they would get completely destroyed by ORS even with the best cabin config and service profile
I could see Khoianh's idea working, if it were coupled with pinto_97's idea of changing how image works, so that image (and therefore ORS) depends much more on the age of the aircraft interior rather than the age of the aircraft.
In other words:
the maintenance cost of aircraft increases more quickly than at present, creating an incentive for players to update their fleet and increasing the depth of the second-hand market; and
the image of an aircraft's interior degrades over time, but can be refreshed by refurbishing/replacing the interior - this could address Chrisy_P's concern about 757 and 767s being completely destroyed on ORS, when clearly there are plenty of examples of airlines refurbishing their vintage planes and providing popular services (DL and QF's 717s are another good example).
Naturally, you could tweak these ideas to make them work more smoothly in practice. For example:
you could adjust maintenance costs, so that they increase in a somewhat exponential fashion rather than linearly, such that there isn't much of a penalty for owning an aircraft that is 12-24 months old but the cost starts to climb more rapidly after that, and/or taper the cost increase off after a while to address TWAAir's point about 255-year old aircraft;
you could determine the image score based on some combination of airframe and interior age, reflecting the reality that even well-maintained elderly planes tend to be less reliable;
you could tweak the delivery rates for aircraft - although airlines already hit a cap on their growth rate once they max out their delivery rates, so this isn't a new problem.
Taking a step back from the detail of the proposal, the reality is that AS already distorts reality by dramatically increasing the profitability of airlines. In my mind, it is a good idea to offset that hyper-profitability in other ways, to produce a simulation that more realistically reflects the challenges that airlines face in maintaining their profitability. In my mind, the right question to ask is whether those changes reflect real-world challenges that airlines face. I think that having to deal with an aging fleet is a realistic, real-world challenge, and so would be a good change.
I am getting a feeling that people that like this idea are probably the ones who play the limited time game worlds and want to be the biggest and best airline. Therefore tweaking the game for those game worlds to make them more of a game than a realistic sim, I can see the runways Idea and this idea work. But please keep this idea away from long term game worlds, because it would ruin airlinesim overall.