Role-Based Airline Management

With this rare opportunity to recreate AE from the ground up, it's a good time to ask some deep questions about what direction we want to move in for the future. When working over the design, I ran into a conundrum: should AE fundamentally be a airline business simulation or an airline scheduling simulation? Right now we're in the middle: the demand and pricing model lacks sophistication, and there are no timetabling or maintenance details. This keeps the player's workload relatively low. However, if we add many features players are requesting left and right, the game's complexity rises quickly. Players who are more interested in the business/competition side could get turned off by the  micromanagement involved in scheduling flights (especially with timetabling), while players more interested in flight schedules and fleet management would not appreciate the more complex market research and revenue management getting in their way.
 
I want to put forth a proposal to redefine "multiplayer" in terms of AE: allow an airline to have two or more roles filled by different players. For example: one player focuses on researching markets, deciding what routes to fly, and what services to provide at what prices, while a second player orders aircraft and optimizes flight schedules to meet those demands. Dividing the labor in such a way would (1) allow each player to focus on his area of expertise and (2) allow a greater depth of gameplay without adding too much complexity for one player to handle. Of course smaller airlines could still be handled well by one player.
 
Furthermore, if we remove the need for each player to have at least one airline to himself, this may lead to a decrease in the total number of airlines. A large airline could conceivably have 3-4 managers under this model, while a smaller airline would have 1 or 2.
 
Managership under this model need not be all-access. From a technical perspective, it would not be difficult to set up a permissions system where each manager can only access certain parts of an airline control panel or perform certain actions. But from a human perspective, "ownership" of the airline would be more complicated.
 
Conflicts of interest can be solved by limiting each player to managing one airline in a world. Or allow airlines to specify whether managerships must be exclusive in that game world.
 
Obviously, teamwork at the airline level would need a lot more details to be fleshed out for it to be a feasible idea. I'm just throwing this idea out there to see how many people would be interested in multi-manager airlines.
 
Finally, this change would induce a lot more interaction among players (as collaborators!). Then again, not all would agree more social interaction is what we need...
 
Thoughts?

Could a Merger and Anti-Trust elements be introduced ?

Anti-Trust to keep two large Airlines from violating real life Anti-Trust laws
en.wikipedia.org wiki United_States_antitrust_law

Quoting the linked to Wikipedia article:

The following types of activity are often subject to antitrust scrutiny.

- Price fixing: An agreement between business competitors selling the same product or service regarding its pricing
- Bid rigging: A form of price fixing and market allocation that involves an agreement in which one party of a group of bidders will be designated to win the bid
- Geographic market allocation: An agreement between competitors not to compete within each other's geographic territories.

And if someone decides he or she does not want their airline anymore they could put it up for sale (Merger) where the Purchasing Airline
would assume all of the Routes, Aircraft, and Employees etc of the Purchased (Merged) Airline

Maybe having what you suggested Yuxi, but as an option, not making it 'mandatory'. As long as it is optional, I am happy to have this introduced, I would use it on many airlines although there are some that I would like to keep 'private'

And if someone decides he or she does not want their airline anymore they could put it up for sale (Merger) where the Purchasing Airline
would assume all of the Routes, Aircraft, and Employees etc of the Purchased (Merged) Airline

once you get to the point of getting several/many aircraft delivered every day, you would not be able to work out a timetable for each of them before the next aircraft arrive.

One can argue that each airline should not be getting that many new aircraft day in and day out for decades on end in the first place. Infinite expansion has always been the norm at AE, but if we look at most routes being overcrowded by 2-3x the demand as undesirable, we may want a more realistic economic model that doesn't push airlines to acquire aircraft at the highest possible rate to the point where players can't physically schedule them in time.

Also, mergers are off-topic and should be discussed in one of the many merger suggestion topics in this forum.

Could there maybe be a mix of "worlds"? So that there would be the option to run a more complicated airline simulation with all it's intricacies with your mates, and the option to run a simpler simulation which you could run by yourself? This may have been said before (that's what I thought of when I saw the third option in the poll), but just my two cents  

Role-based Airline Management is a great idea but I'm against making the game more complicated with too many micromanagement things as to require multiple person playing together. The game should be manageable by single player with normal pace, but he has option to add more player to help him accomplish certain objectives (i.e. top valuation, top reputation, etc). This should not deter new player from joining and play the game, and when he get the hang of it as well as get some friend, he can raise his game play with the multi-player feature.

Currently the game support this function to add one more player, with full authority to do everything, which is a very nice feature. So my suggestion on this is to improve this feature as follow:

1. you can add more than one player to help you manage the airline, i.e. 5

2. for each player, you can assign what function he can do over your airline, i.e order aircraft: NO | buy used: YES | configure cabin: YES | configure IFE/IFS: YES

3. eventually you will be able to label the role name for each player: player A which has function as above, you can label Fleet Manager, Purchaser or whatever.

4. there should be incentive for player that work for a player that own an airline: a percentage of share in the airline or a periodical salary.

Suggestion number 4 maybe out of topic on this thread, but a mechanism should be introduced to reward player that playing for others, i.e. out-of-world money just like we have trophy linked in our profile. When the world ends, we get a certain percentage of our airline value, as well as the airline we work for. I might start another thread on this out of world money idea to explain further.

I believe this would add some realism to the game and enrich the gameplay. Thanks for reading!

What have you decided Yuxi?

What have you decided Yuxi?

At this point I think we will have a more sophisticated managership/permission system than the current single-person shared control feature, but the game will not be built with the assumption that most airlines will be run by multiple people.

At this point I think we will have a more sophisticated managership/permission system than the current single-person shared control feature, but the game will not be built with the assumption that most airlines will be run by multiple people.

nicely put in one sentence, look forward to it.

Yuxi you could make another server e.g one can be multiple if people want to run the airline together 

another if people want to be alone but the 2 servers named after each other can be connected to the players on the server name after them?

Some airline shared some are single

I just wanted to say

Yuxi you could make another server e.g one can be multiple if people want to run the airline together
another if people want to be alone but the 2 servers named after each other can be connected to the players on the server name after them?
Some airline shared some are single
I just wanted to say

A solution to increased complexity is to slow the game speed down. Even playing in real time would add an interesting dynamic and would make the timetable and flight scheduling more interesting.

Time tabling is AE4 but I don't think it will be in real time though. I disagree with real-time since I don't want to have to wait 2 weeks for one 737 at the start of the game

You could buy used or lease. 

Good luck picking up good aircraft on the used market at the start of the game

Good luck picking up good aircraft on the used market at the start of the game

I suppose it would depend on when it started. At the dawn of aviation? Well, no. But, if it started in 1985, used aircraft could be placed in game for anyone to buy.

Yes I think that if we had real-world style order queues and used aircraft from the start it could be more realistic

Ideally, you can make all sorts of AIs and let users choose if they want to assume all the roles manually by themselves, delegate to other players, or assign to different AIs with different characters by default. But as for me, the most wanted AE4 feature is deadline, so all these if ever implemented should come in AE4.1