From what I can tell, the basic resource companies are not profitable, and thus meager pleb jobs are the only way to scrap by for new players.There seems to be talk of stimulating demand but I'm not sure how permanently this would solve the problem because:
1) there are no switching costs associated with changing jobs (unless you have a higher paying job than is on the market - rare)
2) there is no limit to the number of jobs one can post
As a result we're seeing companies ask for 9,000 slots at the new market rate- which I imagine is nullifying profit potential.
My proposal:
1) Increase worker productivity for doing jobs in the same industry multiple times
2) Increase worker productivity, additively, for working at the same company, with a bonus only applicable to that company
3) Cap the number of job slots a company may post to a small number, increaseable with investment
4) Change the application mechanism to actually send an application requiring approval
Effects as follows
1) Incentivizes workers to specialize and differentiate, which will cause different markets to grow independently
2) Force companies to consider the value of their employees in the long term. Likely offering raises
3) Be more realistic and will encourage different wage strategies (high wages for high performers, underpaid wages for bottom performers, etc.)
4) Make this workable
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Secondary suggestion: Limit the amount of energy recoverable in one day and increase the cost of managerial functions in order to require delegation of duties in large business empires
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Tertiary suggestion: Health and energy don't really make sense and is probably a nuisance to mildly successful players. Make food and shelter requirements for keeping your health up. Make energy a finite resource, refreshing daily, so that you as a game dev can better define the scale of actions that can be done each day.
One question, what does it matter if companies offer for example 10000 jobs? They will only be able to hire to a certain point, and will disappear from the job listing when they can't afford more employees.
Profitable company types are expensive. Scaling up a company is a function of available capital only, and not time. Therefore the wealthy companies can actually keep people in poverty by raising wages to the point at which New players can’t grow with low tier profitability companies.
If, for example, you introduce a new resource like clothes that is more profitable, those who are already rich will instantly be able to pivot and hire the whole labor market to that rather than, say, cement.
With no switching costs and instant scaling available to the rich, it probably won’t be plausible for most players to reach a profitable company style like retail or construction.
With tight scaling limits, retailers would need to buy from other resource manufacturers and the profit margins would even out. Or, they could make a ton of resource generation businesses which wouldn’t be so bad so long as the above recommendation of limiting managerial capacity requires bringing in would-be plebs to do managerial work.
I guess I don’t know for sure, but I’m assuming right now top players are rich because they own both the resource manufacturers and the retailers- and can thus produce resources at an exchange rate loss but a retail profit.
As a result we're seeing companies ask for 9,000 slots at the new market rate- which I imagine is nullifying profit potential.
My proposal:
1) Increase worker productivity for doing jobs in the same industry multiple times
2) Increase worker productivity, additively, for working at the same company, with a bonus only applicable to that company
3) Cap the number of job slots a company may post to a small number, increaseable with investment
4) Change the application mechanism to actually send an application requiring approval
1/2: I do like increasing worker productivity, but that doesn't motivate the worker to stay. Bonuses are a no go, I don't want to pay someone more than I agreed to.
3: Amount of jobs is a non-issue as Gluten has mentioned, because you ultimately can't hire more than you can pay.
4: Changing application to require both to approve would sadly ruin the system, as new players would have to wait way too long to get approval (I usually only login in the evening for example, they would have to wait all day to earn anything).
I do agree something could be added to somehow tie the company to the worker, just so you think twice about the amount of workers and wage you can afford to pay sustain-ably.
Something along the lines of:
- Paying a fee (X times wage) when firing employees,
- Going bankrupt (automated auction where employees and debts are reset for the company) when you can't afford to pay wages for X days.
It also has nothing to do with being rich or not as you suggested - profit margins are and will most likely always be minimal for everyone, prices (both exchange and retail) and wages will balance each other out. :-)
On bonuses I meant bonus production. Not pay. Meaning that someone who works in food production a lot will be good at food production anywhere. But someone who works for XDCD food co. Specifically he will get even better at making food when he works there (two additive pools of improvement). This means the employer won’t want to lose long running employees and the employee has a reason to try and build company specific skills to earn better wages.
On profit margins being minimal this is admittedly something I don’t know, but food sells for 2 bucks on the exchange and 6 bucks in retail. I am assuming that retail owners are making food for 3 bucks in their own stores and making $3 profit. They don’t have much of a reason to buy food from the exchange because demand is tame but even if it weren’t they should still logically go for this profit. The only recourse is having the resource-without-retail guys push hard to raise the exchange price but they’re too poor to pull this off. Am I wrong? Maybe there are some transaction costs in passing food to your own retail?
And also on 3) while I recognize that 9000 is an irrelevant number bounded by finance, what I’m proposing is a much smaller limit. To drive the choice between needing lots of companies and thus decision making employees or investing a lot of money to make your few businesses very high capacity but self managed.
On bonuses I meant bonus production. Not pay. Meaning that someone who works in food production a lot will be good at food production anywhere. But someone who works for XDCD food co. Specifically he will get even better at making food when he works there (two additive pools of improvement). This means the employer won’t want to lose long running employees and the employee has a reason to try and build company specific skills to earn better wages.
On profit margins being minimal this is admittedly something I don’t know, but food sells for 2 bucks on the exchange and 6 bucks in retail. I am assuming that retail owners are making food for 3 bucks in their own stores and making $3 profit. They don’t have much of a reason to buy food from the exchange because demand is tame but even if it weren’t they should still logically go for this profit. The only recourse is having the resource-without-retail guys push hard to raise the exchange price but they’re too poor to pull this off. Am I wrong? Maybe there are some transaction costs in passing food to your own retail?
Explain more about the production bonuses, I'm intrigued, how would the employee benefit from being 'higher skilled' at producing a product (with the current system of offering everyone the same wage at a time). How would this work exactly?
About the profit margins, even if retail prices seem much higher than exchange, the retail demand is very low, thus a bigger margin is required. Supplying the retail store always goes through the exchange whether it's external or internal suppliers (can't trade items between companies). Soon as retail demand picks up a little I'm sure the exchange prices will follow accordingly, this is how the market will always be balanced out.
If I had to implement a system with minimal UI/System changes- I would first allow managers to give individual hired workers a raise (strictly upwards). This would be a simple but valuable addition to the manager’s toolset and would encourage chat negotiations/strategy differentiation’s. On the job boards side I would add a column for job requirements. Meaning you would have to sort through the opportunities available to you. Company A offers $4 for 1* food workers. Company B offers $20 but only 5***** workers can apply. Combined, each worker should tend to grow in value to their current employer slightly faster than to a competitor, so there is an incentive to pay above baseline market rates- not unlike the real world where people become experts in a companies own processes and shitty legacy systems. Amusingly you could even have workers band together union style and threaten to leave as a group.
2nd paragraph is interesting. If that is the case then it is indeed *very* low.
