It would be nice to have the ability to create jobs to transport player produced commodities.
COMMODITY SYSTEM IS UNDERUTILIZED AND HARD TO START:
All the commodity system is so far underutilized.
It is hard to create and run a production line, as it involves many steps, constant flying and costant interaction between 3 or more players (for Chemical, Agriculture, Food Processing and Clothing).
Transporting the goods is one of the constraints.
There are two ways in which a commodity business can be run at the moment:
- a corporation, where everyone can move everything and all profits are shared in percentages
- using trade offers to exchange commodities with business partners
The first option, the corporation, requires a long term commitment between 3 (or more) players that will form the corporation, and it also requires that it is possible to decide profit share percentages that are good for everyone.
What happens if one player goes away for some time? What happens if another player wants to join?
Both cases might require to readjust the shares and decide again a fair share, which could be tricky.
Regardeless of the shares, each time someone drops out, even temporarily you have to find someone else or require more effort from the remaining shareholders.
In the second option, using Trade Offers, you are more free on deciding which you interact with and change it from time to time if needed.
As an example, you might be operating Agriculture and you use Trade Offers to send Biowaste to a Chemical partner for reprocessing it into Fertilizer. If you current Chemical partner stops playing for a bit, you can simply ask another player with Chemical specialization to do it.
The Trade Offer system does not require to readjust shares, but it has also its own drawbacks.
In contrast with the Corporation, where everyone owns everything in a sense, with the Trade Offers when you send the product you are actually transferring the property.
So if you send 1000 Biowaste to the Chemical partner and then he never sends you back the Fertilizer, your biowaste is gone forever.
This could be solved if the Chermical partner could send you the Fertilizer at the same time that you send the Biowaste (you give him 1000 Biowaste, he gives you the equivalent 3000 fertilizer in the same offer).
However, since the commodity business is almost unused, is almost impossible to find a Chemical refinery having the fertilizer to send as collateral. He will need to acquire your biowaste first, and only then send you the result with a separate offer.
So in general, every transfer of property for processing will require two Trade Offers, one to transfer the raw product, one to get the refine product.
So the Trade Offer system requires a lot of interaction each time processing or transport is to be done by another player.
Back to the original request, it would be nice if players could create jobs to transport commodities.
A player with some commodites could setup a job to transport a commodity from A to B, specifying both the reward and penalty and also a deadline, just as regular jobs.
If the job expires or the deadline passes, the commodity would go back in possession of the owner.
When creating the job, it should also be possible to ensure the commodity paying 1% of its PP value, in case the commodity gets lost in a crash.
This feature would have the following benefits:
1) ENGAGE MORE POPLE: It would enable the commodity system to engage other players who love flying (the primary reason we play Aviatife) but do not have the interest or commitment to setup a business.
2) MAKING COMMODITY BUSINESS EASIER: It would enable business oriented players to offload some of the transport work to other player, thus facilitating more people to setup a business
3) CONTRACTED CARGO PILOTS: Interestingly, a player will also be able to create a job and then accept it himself and then assign it to players who work for his airline with a contract. Thus, it would be possible to have pilots that officially do the cargo flights for the company.
4) PLAYER RUN ECONOMY, A LIVELY AVIATIFE WORLD: It would make the game more lively and “run by the players” as a widespread commodity business would influence economics. The commodity business at the moment is “invisible” to those who do not partecipate, while with this feature everyone would see the jobs appearing in the lists. Given that commodity business can have good margins if setup properly, player would actually looks for those jobs.
5) MORE MONEY, MORE PLANES, HELPING NEW AIRLINES TO START: The profits from the commodity business would also enable to setup proper airlines. It is currently very hard run an airline with contracted pilots, for a number of factors.
One of this factors is that the profit for an airline using rented planes is very low if you want to give a good hourly pay to the pilots (and if you don’t, they leave to fly by themselves, rightly so).
So you need to use owned planes, which are very expensive to buy, requiring a lot of hours of flying. If you were to pay them with the profits of the airline you would basically never start and easily crash in finance as the first owned planes crashes. The commodity business, with higher margins (and being profitable also using rented planes) can kickstart airlines.
As an example, with the profits from the commodity business I can buy more than an A320 or a B737 every month. If I had kept flying standard jobs (with rented A320/B737), I would have probably needed about 350 hours of flying to buy one, which is like 2 month of full flying as if it were an 8-hours a day job (!!). And this is just to buy one plane, which you would not give out to someone else but probably keep for yourself… so let’s say about double that, 4 months (at 40hours/week!), just to have a second plane to give to someone else, praying he does not crash it (othwerise you are back several millions, even with insurance).
In short, airlines cannot really start if they do not get a solid income first. Commodity business can do it.
All in all, I think this feature would really make Aviatife more lively and engaging… let’s do it! 