Need to fix the income system ASAP.

[CAPFlyer]

Konny, I know that you're worrying about bugs in the system itself, but the income system is definitely starting to show its own flaws.

I just flew my C-208 from Burlington, VT to Augusta, ME. That flight had 3 passengers who paid $75 each. I had to buy 2000 pounds of fuel, and that cost me $1800.

Now, I can understand not making any money on that flight, but because of the multiplier, I lost $1.6 million. That's just flat out unrealistic, not to mention disasterous to anyone wanting to link multiple flights together by purchasing all of the fuel at the starting location and then ferrying it through the rest of the flights.

I also would like to suggest that the system be setup that when a plane begins its first flight, the first tank of gas either be free or that you setup the system so that the aircraft has a reasonable amount of starting fuel on it instead of it being empty. This makes more sense as you usually don't have to start from scratch with these planes, they have at least a minimum amount of fuel aboard from their delivery flight (somewhere around 25% of total capacity or a bit more depending on aircraft). This will help people with that first flight in the airplane where they have to take more fuel than normal which causes it to really hurt at times.

BTW, here's the log.out from that flight -

Log.out
===========================================================================

Getting pilot data:
ID 69
Name Christopher
Surname Trott
User CAPFlyer
EMail chris@flygma.com
VA ID 49
VA User GMC101
Rank CEO
Location KBTV
Budget 10039

Getting log data:
ID 1759
AC ID 426
User ID 69
Route ID 2646
Status 0
Duration 29
Distance 144
PAX 3

Getting route data:
ID 2646
Airline Green Mountain Cargo
Dep KBTV
Arr KAUG
Deptime 10
Arrtime 130
Route BTV BML AUG
Type C208
Number GMC130
State 2
Simrate 1
Ticket 75

Getting log data:
ID 1759
AC ID 426
User ID 69
Route ID 2646
Status 0
Duration 29
Distance 144
PAX 3

Getting route data:
ID 2646
Airline Green Mountain Cargo
Dep KBTV
Arr KAUG
Deptime 10
Arrtime 130
Route BTV BML AUG
Type C208
Number GMC130
State 2
Simrate 1
Ticket 75

Setting Fuel: 0 kg, 0.000000 kg
Left Main Tank Quantity: 504.426636
Right Main Tank Quantity: 504.426636
Left Aux Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Right Aux Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Tip Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Right Tip Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Center Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Main Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Right Main Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Left Aux Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Right Aux Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Left Tip Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Right Tip Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Center Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Fuel left: 0.000000
Refuel Process successful

Getting nearest airport: KBTV

Setting Fuel: 2200 kg, 2200.000000 kg
Left Main Tank Quantity: 504.426636
Right Main Tank Quantity: 504.426636
Left Aux Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Right Aux Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Tip Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Right Tip Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Center Tank Quantity: 0.000000
Left Main Tank Percentage: 0.989146
Right Main Tank Percentage: 0.989146
Left Aux Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Right Aux Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Left Tip Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Right Tip Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Center Tank Percentage: 0.000000
Fuel left: 0.000000
Refuel Process successful

0137 - Overspeed-taxi penalty set active
0137 - Airborne ( Overspeed-taxi penalty deactivated)
Getting nearest airport: KAUG

[cmdrnmartin]

Well, your next flights, where you dont have to buy any fuel, will turn a profit. It balances itself out.

[CAPFlyer]

Actually, it will take almost 10 equivalent flights without purchasing a single pint of fuel to make up that loss.

The income from that flight (without fuel purchase) was $210. That means that I would have made $210,000 if not for the fuel purchase. Now, tell me how that works out to balance if it takes you 10 flights to make up for your first flight on an airplane instead of the profit system working more realistically and simply remove the multiplier. I don't understand how removing the multiplier would be very hard to do from an operational or programming standpoint.

[JJacobs]

well its your fault to not carrying enough pax, which is probaly from low rep.

[CAPFlyer]

well its your fault to not carrying enough pax, which is probaly from low rep.

Okay... it seats 8 people... 3 pax is normally enough to make a profit on a real airplane. The problem is the way the program calculates costs and then multiplies that by 1000 to artificially inflate incomes. If you solve the inflation, you solve 99% of the income problems people are having.

Think of it this way - in the real world, a flight like what I flew wouldn't even come close to hurting the company, yet with that 1000 multiplier, it reduced my funds by over 1/3. That's not anything near being realistic.

[JJacobs]

Yeah the C208B just needs 3 pax to make a profit. BUT i think you mustve loaded to much fuel. But I'm not sure

[cmdrnmartin]

Since FLYNet is in Beta, all suggestions are taken and considered. I dont mind the 1000 multiplier, I just think of it as meaning we flew a lot of flights (And Air Cargo prices, where airlines make real money, isnt factored, only PAX so far, so the multiplier sort of helps that).

If you have an alternate system, feel free to post it, virtual economies are very hard to create, so any help is deeply appreciated. Remember, it has to be fair and not advantageous to a specific user group.

[Ionathan]

On the other hand the elimination of the multiplier would make it extremely difficult to make serious money even if you had chosen the correct amount of fuel on a full with passengers aircraft. My first flight in Flynet also ended with a loss because I filled up the tanks of a CRJ-200. I completed one flight but after that I had fuel for two or three more flights (if I remember well) which means I had pure profit (no fuel cost) for the next flights. I don' t see why the mutiplier casues more loss than profit as it multiplies equally losses and profits.

[CAPFlyer]

I've already put forth the alternate, factor in hourly cost of operation of the aircraft. That is a much more accurate way of figuring costs and operations.

Also, if you want to simulate multiple flights, still don't multiply by 1000.

Say you have 10 flight a day and you fly 1 flight a day. Multiplying the flight cost by 10 will account for the difference of not flying all 10. I seriously doubt that any of the VA's here can justifiably say that for every 1 flight they fly, there were 1000 that weren't flown. Even GMA, which has a fairly comprehensive flight schedule (but not the one I'm running here on FlyNET), only has 400 flights per day. We averaged 4-5 flights a day up until recently, so that means that a multiplier of 100 would still account for all of the flights that weren't actually flown.

The point is that the multiplyer at minimum is set too high, and even with the introduction of hourly costs of operation in addition to the current figures, the multiplyer could still remain, but again, at a much lower factor, something like 100 or even 50.

[Ionathan]

Have you thought how many months it would take then to buy a B734?

[cmdrnmartin]

well its your fault to not carrying enough pax, which is probaly from low rep.

Okay... it seats 8 people... 3 pax is normally enough to make a profit on a real airplane. The problem is the way the program calculates costs and then multiplies that by 1000 to artificially inflate incomes. If you solve the inflation, you solve 99% of the income problems people are having.

The Break even point on most aircraft is above 60% load.

Now, even if we had no multiplier, realize that if you don't fly properly/efficiently and make good use of your routes, you will still lose money, not as much, to be sure, but you will still lose money. The flights that generate a profit don't have a multiplier on them either, correct? So there's going to be no magical income just by dropping the multiplier.
With the multiplier on, sure you lost more, but each flight after that will have you making more money as well. SO the multiplier has no real effect other than speeding the game up. Poor Fuel management, both on the ground and in the air, is still poor fuel management.

So you want Hourly cost of operations instead. How do we know what that is? WHere do we get the data to implement that? What factors go into the hourly cost of operations? And regardless, if your on the groun at an airport, and you decide to fill your tanks with 2000lbs of kerosene, you will pay for all of it. You don't pay for how much you burn in the air, you pay for what you put into the plane on the ground. By adding an hourly cost of operation, your increasing the amount of money a flight costs, not decreasing it.

All I can really recommend is that you read the sticky posts in the general forum, it will help you maximize the profit from your operations. I know you might not like the idea of flying from a different airport, but look at AA and there plans for Manchester, due to the high price of fuel, they can't afford to stop there, and are cutting back 12 other flights, to try to save money. If a route is unprofitable, you either take the hit, or you drop the route. I already know I won't make any money from the TU-144 flights to heathrow, but Im going to keep them anyways, and lose about 10~20 million each time. I make it up with my other profitable routes, and selecting certain airports to refuel at, instead of other more expensive ones.

Don't think Im trying to stifle creativity here, Im not, you can always post new ideas, and they are considered, but they are considered with a critical eye.

Cheers,

[Ionathan]

I will second cmdrnmartin. Right to the point.

[CAPFlyer]

Other than the fact that you are stifiling this idea without actually reading the past posts on this exact proposal that includes how to get the data I suggest and finding a good estimation of it for ones you don't have, you're right, you dont' stifle creativity.

Then again, you didn't read my last post where I said that no matter what reasoning behind it, the multiplyer is still too high and justifications for reducing it to 100x, 50x, or 10x to be a more "realistic" example of accounting for not all of the flights being flown. Again, Konny set it arbirarily and said it was set too high, yet he won't go in and bring it down. If you want to use the rationale that the multiplier is to simulate the other flights being flown, I challenge you to find that there are more than 100 flights in the schedule per 1 flown. There are few airlines out there in the real world that have enough flights to be able to say that if you fly 1 flight per day, there are 1000 more not flown, and I'll challenge you to find a VA that has an appropriate amount of routes (not these idiots who built 40,000 flights and have 2 pilots) to be able to say the same.

Also, I know how to manage my profitability. A C208 only needs 3 passengers to make a profit. I know that from experience in the real world. Not every airplane is the same in how many it needs to carry to make a profit.

The point I've been making is that I should have lost SOME money on that flight, but going back to the issue brought up before about training flights, loosing that much money for a single flight will bankrupt a company in short order, especially if it's new. That INHIBITS growth of this software because people just starting are going to loose a ton of money on their first couple of flights and then dissappear and complain and moan and throw fits because they lost all of their money after only a handfull of flights because that multiplier took all of their money. I am trying to start a realistically sized airline (small planes, small number of planes) and the 1000x multiplier makes one bad flight just about bankrupt the airline, especially with the starting funds you have with FlyNET (and as little as you'd have in the real world). All of the rest of you have gone with massive airplanes and massive airline empires from the start instead of starting small and building and trading up, like a real airline would. Had you started realistically, you would have had a couple of smaller jets (like second-hand 737-200s or DC-9s), grown as you got more money and added new flights as you bought new airplanes. Then, after a year (virtual or otherwise) of operations, you'd start trading up to bigger and better planes, maybe receiving your first all-new airplanes. The point is, you guys are making flights that have pre-multiplier profits in the $10,000+ range, I'm trying to make flights that have profits of less than $1000, thus this multiplier hurts a LOT more than it does those that have huge profits per flight. A perfect example is the Tu-114 flights, because of your 30 other flights that make multi-million profits each, you can accept at $10-million loss on one flight and still come out on top. If I had 30 flights that made a $30,000 profit post multiplier ($900,000 total) and then 1 flight that lost me $1.6 million, I've just wiped out all of the profits I just made and then some because of that. Tell me how the multiplier has a fair application at all levels when you take that into consideration.

This whole thing also rolls into the whole "training flight" issue as well. The multiplier as current makes it impossible to have pilots fly them because there is zero passenger revenue and the costs are multiplied by 1000. I do agree with the other post that such flights should have a separate setting for training flights that gives 0 passengers and no multiplier.

So, let's sum it up again -

1) Multiplier should be reduced to a reasonable level (10-100).
2) Training flights should have a separate setting (0 pax, 0 multiplier)
3) Hourly Cost of Operation should be factored into costs in addition to crew, catering, and fuel. This information can be garnered by a google search and by educated estimates (if you know how much one costs, another of similar size, capacity, and age have similar costs of operation; fuel is what makes them different).

I think if those 3 issues are addressed, the financial side of the program will be pretty much complete and the costs will not discourage new people from coming in and starting new companies.

[cjk2448]

I agree with the idea of setting it up so you 'have' to start smaller with second hand a/c - i like that idea a lot. More realistic. But is really stumping me is this, maybe I can explain the problem a bit more than JUST the multiplier.

If I had 30 flights that made a $30,000 profit post multiplier ($900,000 total) and then 1 flight that lost me $1.6 million, I've just wiped out all of the profits I just made and then some because of that.

You loose the same about of money (percentage wise) at no mulitplier as you do with it at 10, 50, 100, 1000, or 10000000. In the end as long as EVERY flight both profits and loses are multiplied equally, you will still end up with the same lose.

NOW!, I do get this. A 737-600 is 45mil. You go and just need one flight to get over that 45mil mark in your balance to buy you a new plane. OOPS, you loose 6 million instead of making 5 million. So in all you just lost 11mil on a flight because of program error or otherwise. So, instead of flying TWO flights to get enough money to buy a new plane, you have to fly 4.

I think THAT is what Chris T is trying to point out

[cjk2448]

Heck I don't know - I just read it again and it still ends up all being the same. But there is SOMETHING in there that can help!! LOL