Maintenance Patch 2019-02

Today we are releasing the second big maintenance patch of 2019. For this release we focused on the aircraft market and decided to give the current version its first significant overhaul since it was introduced in 2012.

Based on player feedback over the years and to enhance fair play, we have created a new framework for private offers and contracts, while also making aircraft ownership more attractive thanks to much increased buy-back prices.

We made various improvements to the usability of the aircraft market, allowing players to find offers more easily based on their personal preferences and to avoid accidental bids that have caused concern in the past.

Version 6.4.0 Release Notes

New Features

  • Aircraft Market: Offers now are filtered by offer type (auction or immediate purchase) and by financing type (cash, credit or leasing).
  • Aircraft Market: One can now display all aircraft offers and optionally filter them by aircraft family or aircraft type.
  • Aircraft Market: New filters to only display private and/or official offers.
  • Private aircraft leasing contracts now have a minimum term of 4 weeks after the contract is closed and a cancellation period of at least 7 days. A contract can be cancelled at any time but will only actually be terminated once the above terms have been reached. The rules do not apply to intra-holding (and all official) contracts.
  • New option for exclusive game worlds to open all countries or none to foreign investment.

Changes

  • Aircraft Market: The purchase/bid buttons follow the filter settings and only display a single option.
  • Aircraft Market: The initial price selected by the seller/lessor of an aircraft now equals the first bid in an auction.
  • Aircraft Market: Aircraft can only be offered for sale or for leasing, not both.
  • Aircraft Market: The range of available pricing options when offering an aircraft has been reduced.
  • Aircraft Market: The base price for new aircraft offers is now age-based instead of the original purchase price.
  • Aircraft Market: The buy-back prices of the automated aircraft trader have been adjusted to the new pricing options (trader will buy aircraft at 50% price point).
  • Aircraft Market: Auction bid intervals now increase with lower starting prices, giving players more time to react to cheap offers and to reduce misuse of low prices for illegal aircraft transfers.
  • Aircraft Market: All offers are now visible on the market, including your own or any that you are not allowed to bid on. Own or restricted offers are marked as such and don’t display the bid button.
  • During company liquidation, owned aircraft are “sold” to AirlineSim for half of the normal buy-back price to encourage the use of the market instead of liquidating.
  • Link to AirlineSim Discord chat added to Community menu.
  • Wording/content of credits page updated.

Fixes

  • Clearer information about credit consumption on “Your Holdings” page and removed link to outdated wiki page on the subject.

PS: We also added a hidden mechanism that is desigend to work against cheating, based on the lessons learned from Xiguan.