I was wondering, whether it’s in the spirit of the game if a one of those giant airline groups comes along and basically bullies small airlines out of a market. Because currently you can see how one of those giant airline groups is just pumping an amount of money in a subsidiary, so it gets over 600 planes in just about four months. That’s growth which is just impossible for independent and / or young airlines. Oh, and basically all of those planes are bought used which means the used plane market is empty, which is even more frustrating when you see most of those aircraft being stored and not actually used for operations…
I find this frustrating and I can’t imagine, this is how the game is supposed to be played. I understand that generally big airlines have the right to enter a new market if they see fit. But I feel like them just bulldozing down a market seems unreasonable and unsportsmanlike.
So I was wondering. Is this allowed by the rules? Or is it “just” unfair?
Are you talking about an open market country or an EU treaty country? Personally, I would suggest new players don’t start in these types of countries on an old server as you will face exactly the same issue you are talking about. There are cases where players succeeded in these markets, including on the server I’m on, but it really depends on the old players’ activities and their tolerance of new players.
I don’t see how older players can take you out in a closed market from another country; it’s not like they can use their current holding money and create a new holding with the old money. You might have slot issues, but it’s for everyone.
To be fair, unless you started from the beginning of the game world, everyone started in the game with the possibility of older players in the same market pushing them out if there was one, so you want to select your home country wisely, even though it might suggest it’s not the country you like. So I guess you can say it’s unfair, but it’s unfair for everyone. You can see the trend of single or a few players dominating a big market on older servers; though I don’t think it’s healthy for the server, that’s how it works…
I’m not sure about the rules on hauling used aircraft. I would assume it doesn’t break the rule as the player is paying for them, but if I remember right, hauling slots (assigning planes to slots but not activating them in mass) is breaking the rule.
Well, this case is even more tricky. It’s an EU country, but the airline has been founded by a foreign entity, which got the traffic rights through the share market. Generally, I think most members are aware of the risks of operating in the EU but this seems unreasonable to me - as I said before: this just looks like bullying.
But I’m glad you share the general opinion that this is unhealthy. It seems bad that the consolidation is happening so extrem that most servers end up being dominated by only very few airline groups…
I agree with the original post here too. Not only is it unfair and ruins the experience for everyone else (new or old to the server) - it goes against everything airline sim stand for - REALITY. This game was founded on the basis of following real world traffic dynamics and bringing everyone a sense of a real simulated experience. People are now paying to watch some random guy headquartered in Pakistan setup fully owned and controlled third party airlines, across the planet in any country he may see fit, buy up every used aircraft he physically can and just let them sit in his inventory so no one else can use them. The latest airline this guy set up, currently held 67 unused aircraft yesterday and has recently taken over 160 aircraft off the market in the past 3 weeks.
For starters how does any of this relate to a simulator experience and real life - none of this can happen in reality - from made up traffic rights, to bulk buying billions worth of planes to just sit on the ground whilst the rest of your fleet pump and dumps prices on every conceivable European route.
The support team really need to look into this. With someone who works in aviation and has brought handfuls of friends to this game where we have all contributed hundred and hundreds of dollars to this game, we are all getting very tired of this and really are starting to think of leaving.
Actually not tricky at all; that’s completely normal. Some players will just use their other EU treaty airline to cover the country, while others will set up a new division. There are no additional traffic rights obtained between the two methods. You will always end up with very few huge airlines in the EU treaty region when the server gets older, so this is not really bullying at all; that’s actually my expectation on AS.
What I meant by unhealthy is the about the server and the number of players on the server, not the results of fewer airlines in the market, such as the EU treaty countries. Just from a realistic sense, only a few airline groups dominate the EU treaty region: IAG, Lufthansa, Air-France-KLM, Ryanair, etc. There is no antitrust in AS, so obviously, it will be even worse on AS, but it’s not like the reality is much better, either.
Yes and no. AS tries to simulate the reality, but definitely not the traffic dynamics. Hub and spoke system is always the preferred system on AS because of the traffic connections, while this is becoming less and less in real life. This brings in more opportunities and possibilities for the game, but not real at all. AS ground network is pretty much none which is really opposite from reality, so many routes that won’t work in real-life works great in AS, and you can find plenty of discussions here because of the resulting slot conditions. I think there are things that can be improved for the game to make it better, but I won’t expect it to reflect the real world either because I don’t think it’s feasible from a data standpoint.
Only for open market, not closed market. There are only a limited amount of open market countries, and eventually, it will run out. There is no long-term server as far as my knowledge has a full open market across the server.
I disagree with this so strongly. Of IAG and Lufthansa alone, there are 11 airlines independently operating. Yes with financial backing, but not from wholly own subsidiaries around the other side of the planet. EasyJet (and their independent AOCs) along with Ryanair and airfrance klm with delta provides such varied networks and competition, the complete opposite of what we are now experiencing in our server. I wouldn’t mind if this huge airline, had 6 different airlines operating in Europe, just like IAG do, but that’s not the reality of it in AS. Having just one single airline dominate, dump prices, hog aircraft and expect that to be fun for the rest of us is just naive an unhealthy for a community.
I don’t see it being different between having one single airline with multiple countries (how most AS EU airlines work) and having multiple subsidies. You can transfer money between divisions anyway. If they want to do it, they can do it with one company or many.
If you have such an anti-competitive EU airline on your server, it won’t be my recommendation to start in such an environment in the first place…
That’s the point - it wasn’t an issue when we joined, it was fair an balanced but it spread like an out of control disease and it’s just going to kill the game for everyone
What you are facing seems to be uncommon… The traffic right is obtained through IPO, so I would assume someone in the EU treaty market is enabling this. I can’t see the details on how it happens, but i would assume there are two or more companies with legal Cyprus traffic rights for this to happen. As long as this is done legally, I’m unsure if anything can be done, as you can’t force people to sell their company. Obviously, what happens isn’t the most popular thing: I did it once, and when I switched alliances, there were concerns raised by some alliance members for exactly the same thing (and it probably wasn’t even impacting him that much as he doesn’t operate in the same country).
i would assume this is one of the reasons why IPO is no longer available on certain new servers.
The only thing I see here that might be illegal is the hoarding of unused discontinued aircraft types. If you want those planes send the player a message and ask kindly to lease them. Hopefully, the player accommodates your wish. Otherwise, AS should help you.
I dont understand the problem. The market conditions are more or less open in AS and players are taking advantage of it. You cant just march into any market and expect to be met without resistance by the players who are already there. They have all the right to resist your entrance. I would too if you entered one of my core markets. I would try my best to bankrupt you and get you out of there. The exact same thing would happen if in the real world if you wanted to start an airline in someone’s already existing market.
With that said AS has very different markt condition. Since I started playing almost 10 years ago the amount of players on some legacy worlds has decreased by more than 70%. That means that large markets are more consolidated than ever and most smaller markets completely lack carriers. On Idlewild the Middle Eastern, South American and African markets are essentially covered by foreign groups in investment open countries.
I am sure that if only 60 players controlled all of the real world’s air travel then they would also have massive market power and would act even more monopolistic than they do now. You cant just open an airline in Europe and expect to grow large completely unopposed. But you can easily fly a couple hundred planes in one of the many medium size open markets that exist on every world. If you want suggestion on good markets to start in hmu.
The traffic rights were granted through an IPO, yes. So the majority of the share is split between two large airline groups. That is incredibly uncompetitive and not monopolies commission in the world would allow this. And the fact that those opposing airline groups are coming together makes it look even more suspicious.
Just to summarize: A foreign entity, which didn’t bother founding a subsidiary in this market for ten years, suddenly comes together with his largest competitor to found a subsidiary, which is pumped so full with money that it becomes one of the 25 largest airlines on the server within six weeks and dumping the price on every route the airline operates… Seriously, how is that fair?
The fact that this group was able to obtain the traffic rights together with another group could feel unfair. That is the reason why IPOs are not enabled on newer worlds.
Other than that - the guys are bored after 10 years of playing the same company and earning too much money. They then start stupid projects.
Try to ignore them or move to another world.
With a bunch of people who all play together already, instead of leaving wouldn’t making your own private world be an option? It doesn’t sound like it’d cost much more than you guys are all paying now, and you’d have more control over the game and who you play with.
Apparently it is against the rules to just own them and have them sit idle, if they are out of production aircraft.
Both myself and Ahmed were contacted by support regarding this issue on Fornebu sever, so I suppose it’s against the rules. We were both advised to out them on market for lease, if we were not using out-of-production aircraft.
This sometimes becomes a hassle if the aircraft get leased by someone who resets shortly after, because you then have to put them back on the lease market manually.
Interesting. I guess they don’t want the cheaper used aircraft under idle to stop airlines’ growth, but based on this logic, it makes no sense for any out-of-production planes to be deleted by the server now… since this will only make it worse.
And maybe the support could even copy your airlines… Basically copy the whole Gatow as-is (they did it with Idlewild for some technical testing) and then you would just delete all the other airlines that are not yours. It might be an option for you to look into.
The aircraft trader only scraps used aircraft if it has more than 49 on offer on the market (signalling that there doesn’t seem to be a demand for said aircraft) and when the aircraft is still in production. If the type is out of production, it will only scrap frames up to a minimum amount of aircraft (the amount that’s generated when the game world launches). Since this “initial value” has changed quite a bit recently, with game worlds sharing the same data source but the values being adjusted for new launches, this might explain temporary issues with more frames being scrapped (might add some insight to the other thread which hasn’t occurred to me back than).
In contrast, an airline hogging out-of-production aircraft for their own use without a.) using them or b.) offering them to other players is - by our definition - a type of resource blocking, as these aircraft are finite.
That said, this rule (like many others) has its origin in “days long gone”, when players valued “classic” planes for much for than just their cheap price tag and keeping them from players who wanted to build an airline around them was sort of impolite :). We also used real-world production numbers for the availability of used aircraft back then, which also made this problem worse.
I’m open to discussing whether and how this rule could or should be adjusted to the reality of the here and now.
Glad that we finial got an answer on the scraping issue
i agree hauling aircraft to prevent competition is not nice, but i think there is also the part that the current leasing market has no constraints on the bids, which probably isn’t the case in real life. It would be great if the owner of the aircraft could set financial, age, alliance, etc., requirements so that there is more control by the owners. It will also be great to have an automatic lease-out listing so that, under the case George mentioned, he doesn’t need to relist the plane again manually. This should make it more desirable for owners to lease out the planes instead of ‘hauling’ them for any non-competitive reason.
i would really hope this can be changed so that it is gameworld based: i think some of the servers have different used plane types; if i remember right, some of the servers have models such as 757 winglet, which is not a thing on my server (Kaitak), so using the same value just doesn’t make much sense to me. There is also the part where there isn’t a catch-up in production when the type ends up with fewer than the initial number for the new servers (which can be a possibility for older servers, especially for widebodies which are not popular in AS). It might be more work on the maintenance side, but i would assume it is feasible (suggestion: basically have two datasheets, one is a server-based number, and one is the latest server number. The server-based database never updates, and the system scraps to the max number between the two databases). This should also make the servers a bit different and provide more things for players to try.
I think more used planes will also help new players: as per the current settings, you will have fewer cheaper planes to use to start as the amount will trend towards a lower number over time until it reaches the latest ‘initial value’.
