well he didnt say the one at 400 euro's were still filling thier plane. he said they were still up there, and all planes were at least 200 or more, so why should someone be able to come in and put a 5 or 10 euro route or w/e. just enough to break even. there's this one airline from vancouver that does 10 euros route on every route i found him on. on one route there was just one other airline on there. who was still able to charge 900 euro's. but the point is that when there gets to be so many airlines on the route, those 10 euro routes effect everyone. so if there's 2 airlines on it right now, the other one shouldnt really care, but when there's up to 10 airlines on the route, it effects everyone else on that route.
and im sick of the answer it's competition. because it's not competition when there's no reason for it. the answer competition means doing what is needed to make as much money or more money than your competition. that's the first, the second is making sure your planes filled.
now instead, these people want to be the only one on the route, they want to not have to edit it ever, and they want to pick low enough one that every else cant still undercut them and make a profit. that is not competition.
now it'd be a promotion if it was for a limited time, but when you have to edit the route once every game week or once every game month, and you see the cheap route time after time after time, it's not a promotion. you cant have a permanent promotion at cost. these people are commiting sabotage agasint the game
I have great respect for this debate, but at the same time i have no reasonable ideas for solutions, especially since i prefer to be pretty laissez fair about competition. The problem i see with any sort of competitive cap (fare pricing wise) is that it's easily refuted.
You can't say X% of the average price on the route, because either the player will walk down the average price using two planes (thus achieving the 5 euro ticket, just taking more effort) or legitimate routes will get stuck at irrationally high fares. Say i was the first airline to do ATL-ORD, and i do it with a dinky little 9 seater. Odds are i can get the fare up around 1500-2500 euros If someone walks in with a significantly larger plane they cannot put a fare anywhere near mine and get a decent loadfactor, but yet they'd be constrained to an irrationally high fare by the rules. Keep in mind "Viable Prices" vary with the plane capacity, various demand modifications, and the frequency of the route. A DC-3 flying 1 round trip may be able to pull in 700 euro fares, when a super connie flying 5 frequencies may only be able to bring in a max of say 70 to achieve 100% lf.
Also, raising the floor on fares isn't a solution either, because if i made it a minimum of 10 euros, there'd just be huge fights with 10 euro fares instead of 1 euro fares (and the routes would be more profitable for the "offenders"). If i made it too high, some large planes would never have a chance at 100% lf on numerous routes which pushes the preference even further to small, cheap planes.
If i require some form of competitive permission system to enter certain airports, it increases the overhead on already overworked admins, and takes a lot of time away from me being able to code (which over the last two or three weeks, and for the next two or three weeks isn't terribly much unfortunately) in new and important features.
If i set a frequency cap, people will just make more routes, over a single route. This is something no one likes anyways.
If i set a cap of "requires profit", it's both unrealistic (as IF United fills a flight from JFK-LAX it only earns 1 dollar on that route, i highly doubt it ever fills the plane) and can be easily used to eliminate competition on a route simply by capacity dumping the others off with cheap little planes en masse.
As far as i can see there is nothing i can do 'successfully'. Successfully will be defined as "relatively achievable", minimal maintenance, feasable, and "effective". The best i can offer for price-slashing is getting out Multiworlds as soon as i can to alleviate the overcrowding in the world. This should reduce some of the damaging affects and allow players who are severely beaten or new to enter "younger" worlds saving some headaches for at least a little while longer.
