Another game update has been released. Read through this announcement to learn what has changed.
Quoting Changelog:
- Government NPCs are now buying food and medicine from retail stores. The amount bought is based on the population of the city, and the system heavily favors the cheapest offers. The amounts bought right now are pretty low, but we'll fine-tune them as we see how it starts working.
- The fee for buying from a different city/country than the one you live in is now higher and changes per amount of items bought.
- Added "Ticker" tab to The Exchange for a quick overview of all prices and changes.
- Showing highscore rank on your Dashboard as well as the player profile page.
- Updated Game Manual and FAQ.
- Added referral system: refer your friends and others to help the game grow!
- Company, player, group and forum pages now have a "title" included in the URL.
- SSL (HTTPS) support.
- Various minor bugfixes and tweaks.
Feedback, ideas and complaints are welcome as usual!
The construction costs were too low before. With a construction you can essentially earn profits forever without any extra fees, so it's worth it to invest the 10x amount.
Awesome, looking good!
Excited to see if and how the govt. purchases will indirectly stimulate the food/med markets and prices in the next couple days :-)
Few small suggestions regarding the update:
- In addition to the current 'worth' (last exchange) add 24H volume and current high bid / low ask (with their respective volumes) to the ticker to make it even more useful :)
Could also make the ticker the main exchange page with links towards: live data / buy / sell per product
- The delivery fee, now based on 10 (inter-city) and 20 (between countries) per item could possibly be modified to:
Use the 10 and 20 as minimum fee's and add 10% (and maybe 15-20% between countries) of total purchase price to the delivery fee. That way, if products prices are a lot cheaper in a different city or country it could be cheaper to order a bunch of them from a different place. It also helps to differentiate the delivery fees between cheap(small) and expensive(big) products.
- Adjust the value of land with buildings on them to reflect the increased building costs.
Few other things that could be useful to analyse the finances of a company.
- Increase the history on company pages (much like pvt history).
- Add an Excel export option to download the complete history of a company/player.
- Adjust debt (in finances and 'net worth') to better reflect a companies 'net worth'. Currently its more like 'balance total'(equity plus debt) rather than 'equity' (total possessions minus debt).
- Add the country and piece of land that generated the sale for retail and apartments to history / finances
Other than that, a few people mentioned this week that wages are too easy to adjust, jobs too easy to quit and it's too easy to fire people.
I figured a possible solution to this could be:
- Small fee (5 usd?) to adjust wages.
- Pay the employee one more wage when firing (unless they haven't worked in ~2 or 3 days), thus you can't fire employees without money.
- Employee has to pay the company half his wage when quitting (unless he quits because the company can't afford to pay for his job i.e. has less cash than the employees wage).
- To prevent people just pulling money out of the company, if they have workers (that attempt to work but they can't pay) for X days put it on auction (so it'll cost the player at least the price of a company).
I think the cost to start a new company should be raised a bit.
This may encourage people to buy companies from others for cheaper rather than having hundreds of companies in the game doing nothing. It'll also make newer players have to work a little longer to get a company without getting a loan and increase demand as they will want to work more everyday to reach that goal. Doesn't need to be drastic increase but an increase that slowly changes in time.
Right now you can afford to get a company on the first day which isn't really good in the long run for the game.
I think a better course of action would be to make potential operating costs more transparent to would-be entrepreneurs. It's not a great idea to start a company without any capital built up, but a new player doesn't have any way of knowing how much capital they should try to raise.
Why do you think that being able to easily start a company is bad for the game?
Awesome, looking good!
Other than that, a few people mentioned this week that wages are too easy to adjust, jobs too easy to quit and it's too easy to fire people.
I figured a possible solution to this could be:
- Small fee (5 usd?) to adjust wages.
- Pay the employee one more wage when firing (unless they haven't worked in ~2 or 3 days).
- Employee has to pay the company half his wage when quitting (unless he quits because the company can't afford to pay for his job i.e. has less cash than the employees wage).
Good points. It seems the law of economics will even most everything out, except for the wage/job system. Like someone mentioned in another thread, it's basically whoever can dominate the top 5 spots who will get all the work.
Thus, even when wages do balance out to market-viability, the job market will still be massively imbalanced due to the way the jobs are offered.
I think a better course of action would be to make potential operating costs more transparent to would-be entrepreneurs. It's not a great idea to start a company without any capital built up, but a new player doesn't have any way of knowing how much capital they should try to raise.
Why do you think that being able to easily start a company is bad for the game?
Right now it's not that bad. My main point is that there shouldn't be a bunch of dead companies in the game doing nothing because what's the point in having 5000 food production companies when only 1000 active people need food and they get enough from the few that actually produce? A stretch but that's my point. So I think either that or delete the companies of dead players if the NW of it is not a certain percentage above the startup cost.
Edit: also it would be nice to rename companies so if you have a certain brand you want to stay with you can use it in companies bought from other people.
To expand on what XDCD suggested, if a company can't pay wages, then it is insolvent and should have it's assets liquidated. Perhaps give a "grace period" where the owners can get their shit together, and actually fund things, with fines leveled against them.
IRL, if I hire 100 people, but run out of money to pay them, there are serious consequences to that.
I really like the idea of having to pay the wage of an employee if you fire them. Maybe even 1.5x their wage, or 2x their wage.
Perhaps a system could be implemented where an employee get's a "worker score" for working consistently, and not quitting too many jobs. Then you could set a minimum "worker score" requirement for new employees.
These 2 things would significantly stabilize the job market, I think, and result in actual loyalty to both companies and employees. It would incentivize higher wages, as an employer, it would decentivize ignoring cash flows and not bothering to keep enough money on hand for employees.
