Currently, passive income in Career mode only works when you are actively flying and your plane is literally in the air.
It would be great if passive income could also work at a reduced rate (e.g., 0.25x-0.5x) while you are offline. After all, it’s called “passive income,” so why does it only accumulate when you’re actively flying?
This would risk becoming just an idle game instead of a career mode. Earning reduced payments while away from the game is basically what those are, and designed to only check in occasionally. I’m not sure exactly how it’s currently supposed to work because it seems that is yet another thing broken for many, but I would side with idea of only earning passive income while actively playing in some fashion. Calling it passive income isn’t the best term for it if it’s not meant to be earned for nothing.
Whenever you are doing stuff in sim, if you got partial passive income would be great. Any activities, challenges even free flight. Cause if it’s truly passive, you can accumulate income while being away for months. Sounds great until your planes need maintenance and eventually all crash. This way you would need to do some sort of management in game.
I think a good balance would be any time spent in the air in any mode. So you can go do free flight, do vatsim stuff, challenges, photo mode or other activities and it will still generate passive income.
Maybe at a lower rate of outside career mode.
It would make it feel like you’re progressing your pilot in some way in any of the modes the sim offers, but avoid it becoming an idle game.
I think offline income would be kind of lame and would suck some of the enjoyment out for me.
I don’t see this as an issue. While the design of the game is certainly targeted towards simulating the flying portion, it’s hard to ignore a significant portion of sim communities look at the management portion as well.
In fact, this game quite literally sets the stage not for a single pilot flying in a career but a multi-billion dollar layered umbrella corporation across a broad range of industries within Aviation. They even track your fleet and locations of all the planes, “home bases”, and profit-loss statements per-company for all manageable streams of credits in or out.
If you look at most other sim games, people work very hard to establish their empires and let their employees handle most of the hard work while managing the high-level functions, like breaking into new markets or exiting out of stale ones. This would not necessarily be a bad thing for this game to implement especially when you consider the level of quality in the simulation itself.
The community behind flight simming will always get on to pilot their favorite planes. Contrast that with, say, Truck Sims where there’s a bigger casual audience, not much depth to the physics(comparatively speaking), significantly less graphical fidelity, among other shortcomings, and a lot of people just end up running a logistics company instead of hauling around cargo.
This is a single player game mode that doesn’t affect you, so how other people choose to play is largely irrelevant provided you can change settings to tailor your experience. The same goes for sim rates, assists, pre-flights and more.
Edit: Considering this is a flight simulator, I would also add that maybe the career mode should allow you to be an ATC Controller as well. Because why not? If we’re talking about simulating flight why not just have everything? Let me go in the tower. The radar systems already work and traffic functions quite well in FS20, so it’s not off the realm of possibility.
Further more, why not be an aircraft mechanic? The dev’s said in one of the talk-shows that they have already programmed and simulated all of the mechanical engineering for the factory planes, down to fluid being pushed through hoses. The only reason you don’t see a hose come loose and spray fluid around for instance is because they, along with the aero manufacturers, decided that it should not be in the game. It’s simulated, you just don’t see it.
But that is all still done during active play. Those sims don’t progress when you are not running the program. That’s what idle games do. I’m fine with your suggestion of being more of an operations user than pilot in career mode, but I think allowing truly passive income while you are not using the sim, game, or whatever this is now, goes beyond the scope of simulating a career. Unless the goal is to simulate being an absentee CEO that only comes in to collect a paycheck once a week and then leave again.
I suppose it’s not an unfair argument to make.
But just to be an semantic dork about it: does a pilot, mechanic, or Tower only operate when Delta’s CEO sits down at their desk? Is income generated by any employee dependent on the boss sitting at their desk?
If a business owner achieves a point in which the business is self-sufficient and needs no high level management, that’s generally considered a good thing. Without simulating problems and requests for approvals you’ll either get bored of the game or start flying yourself again. More likely you’ll just stop playing. But even more likely is that you probably were never going to end up a long-term simmer anyways so it doesn’t make a difference.
For the record, I’m not advocated Asobo go and spend months crafting ATC, Mechanic and CEO functionality. But they have already put tons of effort into the business end of career mode but never fleshed it out. This game certainly sets…some kind of standard… for simulation and detail compared to most games. Including live weather and seasonal demand across industries. Why not flesh it out once the core game actually works. IMO It only adds to the game for those that may not be fulling interested in the existing mechanics and IF the settings are customizable, it doesn’t affect current players whatsoever.
The part about it being a singleplayer game that doesn’t affect you at all is very important to this context. Mods can solve the problem too, of course, but my issue there is that mods very rarely compete with first party systems. Planes? Sure. But look at the usability and polish of career mods now compared to Asobo’s. Much harder to use, much worse looking, often-times having plug-in related connectivity issues, almost all if not all of them are tab-out experiences that just don’t offer the same experience.
Just spitballing. It’s especially important to consider some of these topics, as well as many other topics from “casuals” like me because the games future depends on people coming in, spending money and time on the game, buying DLC’s and planes and content. Otherwise, just like right now, people will stick to what works well for them and choose not to spend their money or time on the new products. This means less content, fewer new games, fewer updates and patch cycles and a decline for the sim as a whole.
I think we should support mods that would allow someone to make this change. I actually don’t like this idea. I wouldn’t want it for me. However, I could understand how someone would want this and would support opening up mods to allow it.
You guys are complaining about not getting passive income when you’re not playing and I’m over here not making any passive income in the past 5 days while playing career mode…
I can appreciate that. Lol
Yes, but there is still a work schedule for the boss to come in and perform required duties that facilitate the underlings being able to do their jobs.
I would argue that is an impossibility in the real world for the reason I stated above.
True. On one end of the spectrum, they could create an insanely detailed grind to get anywhere. On the other end, they could simply just give you virtual money hand over first for no effort at all. When it comes to career mode, a line has to be drawn somewhere. When it comes to passive income, I think that it should be tied to some active use of the sim, even if that use is not inside the career mode itself. Reasonable minds can differ on where to draw that line.
Or perhaps an option where if there is inactive passive income, make it more realistic than a basic idle game. If you don’t log on at some interval, things like customer service, maintenance, employee pilot performance, etc start to get worse until you log back in to right the ship. If you don’t, then the company eventually fails and you have to start over. But again, I would only want to see that as an option, and not one I’d personally use because I get very little time to fly as it is.
I also support the idea of keeping it open to mods. If a mod is created to allow inactive passive income, I won’t complain. I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it as part of the default career mode.
I support this, and sort of figured this was obvious. JUST making money offline isn’t what I was after but rather that the business continues on, like normal. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far to say the business should fail if you’re off too long because the real world matters. If I spend 100 hours over the winter playing this game, progressing and building up and don’t get a chance to play between April and August because I’m too busy in the summer, I shouldn’t be penalized for that.
I’d say IMO, just cap any kind of progression(or regression) at 24-72 hours. Even most idle games do this. or you could tie it to your level much like said idle games do where you can only make so much money or use so much automated resources at any given time. Many of those idle games require your to click on your little farms or whatever every 8 hours otherwise they’re capped out.
Either way, I’m no game designer and quite far from a UX/UI developer apart from my own website, which is pretty weak even by my own standards lol. The closest experience I have is marketing and media where I at least have an understanding of: what people want, how they want it, and roughly how to appeal to the most people as possible without destroying the experience for (“fans”) or putting off new people.
I could see having a cap as being a good thing. Just be careful you don’t feed into the conspiracy theorists ideas that Microsoft is about to be turning career mode into micro-transaction heck. Most idle games become a boring grind fest after a short while, making it near impossible to progress unless you buy their capacity upgrades and level boosters. I think we can both agree that the last thing we want is Microsoft selling us virtual managers and such that keep things in check for us to increase profitability during our time away.
Make sure that your game is offline at 00:00 UTC time 
This has worked for me for the past 3 days or so.
The issue I see with passive income is the plane(s) not actively being flown by the player are not paid out the same as the plane being actively flown. I fly light cargo missions - currently in Australia. On average I get paid 105,000 credits per delivery: about 30,000 base, 29,000 reputation, and 46,000 no skip. Tossing out the Reputation and No Skip bonuses as they pertain specifically to me as the pilot, my company should be seeing about 30,000 credits per flight from my ghost pilots. Even accounting for reductions in passive income due to insurance, I don’t see anywhere NEAR this amount from passive flights. Maybe Asobo assumed we would only have one aircraft per career specialization - making income comparisons much harder?