Exhorbitant Re-Lease costs ? ? ?

[Viscount Bailey]

All I can say is ...

W  T  F   ?

I just had the leases increased for another year on some 773s in the AG game and the thieving ****'s have increased the leases from what was previously around $300,000 per month and has now become around $2.4 MILLION  per month. 

This could kill my relatively new airline. These are leases from the AI not some player that decided to be mean.  Is this correct?  Surely a system error ?

Any advice much appreciated.
Dave  (Thailandair)

[schro]

Like it or not, leases are recalculated based on market value upon renewal. If you want to lock on the rate you need to select a longer initial lease term.

It would be a feature request to set auto renewals to be proportional to the market price initially paid, which does make sense to me....

[Viscount Bailey]

Well this is genius isn't it !  I innocently pressed accept to agree the re-lease. Here is the fault in the system:  When you look to extend the lease the page that pops up gives you options of a few months through to many years. When you make your selection it gives you a price but doesn't state what that price specifically relates to. I selected  "1 Year" extension.  It gave a Price of about $2,400,000.  I knew that my current lease price was about $300,000 per month so I thought I was getting a good deal and that this figure of $2.4 million must be the full year lease. The problem is INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION --> the system doesn't say what period of time the quoted price relates to.  But divide this new price by 12 and it made sense to imagine this was a full 1 year price !

In what world is this sort of DAYLIGHT ROBBERY acceptable?   Well this has absolutely ruined my game, my profits have sunk to less than half what I could achieve before I agreed these lease extension. I could have easily off-leased these planes and gone to the UM to pick up other 773s which are readily available for the similar rates I used to be paying.  Why would the system be deliberately created to do this?  Surely this sort of system incongruity is not what we should accept?  Again surely this must be a system error?

[groundbum2]

I'd say you were triggered, to use modern nomenclature... 

[Viscount Bailey]

I'd say you were triggered, to use modern nomenclature... 

"They saw me coming" ....   "I've been fleeced" ..  yes mate..... something like this. But in the real world my "cooling off period" on a contract would be there to get me out of this sort of crooked and twisted deal!!!

[DanDan]

Another airline that thought, leasing gives a flexible solution to an airlines needs! Not in AWS

[Viscount Bailey]

At leasst leasing from a human player is decent... It seems the AI system has a serious design flaw! CROOKED SYSTEM CALCULATION  PLUS LACK OF CLEAR INFORMATION when commiting to an agreement.

[TMMocha]

You need to turn off the automatic leasing option. It will hurt you a lot since it will continue to lease your current A/C for you with the A/C actual value.

[groundbum2]

thank god it's only a game and not real life...

just had a peek, and when extending a lease, which I think is what you did, it says "new lease price". Now I know it's monthly, and it's a leap to think it's computed a whole life lease cost. I would suggest a feature request or typo request asking that "new lease price" be changed to "new monthly lease price"

problem solved,.

[Sami]

First of all, Viscount Bailey, please stop raging and tone down your "voice", that is not appropriate anymore.

Then; The lease price is calculated based on the aircraft specifications and the length of the lease deal, to name a few key variables. If you had a lease price with <500k/month for a 777 then that was a total steal and you should have been happy to have been able to sign such deals in the past when you originally ordered the planes. I am guessing they were ordered as new planes for a huge discount, or if you leased them as used planes they have been sitting in the market for a very long time and in that case AI decreases the price in order to gain interest to sell/lease the plane. At the moment there are many 777s on the used market so the AI pushes the price down quite aggressively, since the next step for AI is to soon scrap those planes.

When the time for the renewal comes, the automation will always renew for 1 year only since it cannot know what you want to do, and it can't commit you to let's say another 15 year period automatically. And the 1 year lease is really very expensive, like in real life, since the lessor does want the customers to commit to longer leases. Therefore it is always a good policy to be aware of your leases and they are about to expire so you know if you wish to return the plane or keep using it, and possibly determine manually the duration of the extension. (Not an error error, and no flaw and nothing crooked.)

Lease prices are naturally shown on monthly basis - it is the standard in each every lease price throughout the interface.

To compare, the monthly lease fee for a factory new B773 is about $4mil/month at the moment there, so you are simply paying closer to the market rate (2.4 vs 4) now instead of robbing the bank.

[Cornishman]

If I look at all that was said here, seems another situation where a lack of absolute clarity in what the transaction was for is to blame for my dad's frustration (Viscount B is my dad - David). From what you said above Simon - ... I would suggest a feature request or typo request asking that "new lease price" be changed to "new monthly lease price that sounds like the problem. Us regular players already know that to be the case but it's probably not that clear for people that don't regularly play and then the frustration comes when you feel you were caught out.  I know I too have been caught out by systems in the game that don't clearly explain what will happen if you use them so I get his frustration a little bit     

[schro]

Then; The lease price is calculated based on the aircraft specifications and the length of the lease deal, to name a few key variables. If you had a lease price with <500k/month for a 777 then that was a total steal and you should have been happy to have been able to sign such deals in the past when you originally ordered the planes. I am guessing they were ordered as new planes for a huge discount, or if you leased them as used planes they have been sitting in the market for a very long time and in that case AI decreases the price in order to gain interest to sell/lease the plane. At the moment there are many 777s on the used market so the AI pushes the price down quite aggressively, since the next step for AI is to soon scrap those planes.

I think you're missing the core of why his cheese is grated though. There's a few variables in play and 777's are often a good example of them. Yes, new, they can easily run 4m/month (cooresponding to a 300m-ish purchase price). However, on the used side, newer ones owned by the AI brokers that really know their target market (especially low range 777-200/300s) get pushed down to the 500k/month (about a 40m purchase price?) pricing ballpark for a one year lease - this is what I would call a fair market value as this is the price where the agreement between two parties was made. Let's also say that the "calculated" used "value" in this case would be in the 200m ballpark.

At the end of the lease, the renewal then gets calculated on the "calculated" value of 200m as opposed to the "fair market value" of 40m, resulting in a 5x increase overnight of the leasing cost. In reality, the used market will still be littered with the 40m offers of identical planes that are not getting taken up, which implies the AI _should_ be willing to accept a 40m FMV for calculation of the lease (unless market conditions change, but that's when they can decline to renew the lease).

Before the AI got so aggressive with the price drops, this wasn't much of an issue as the deviation between calculated value and FMV wasn't a material amount. At this point it's very material and it's grating more folks's cheese than just Viscount's.

I'd think that if the current "working as intended design" is going to stay in place, the helpful thing to do would be to add some information to the lease pricing/confirmation screen that provides an "estimated lease renewal cost" so the player understands that the below market value FMV lease pricing is a one time offer and won't be extended upon renewal.

The alternative would be to change the renewal lease value calculation to be something like Lease Renewal Value = 1.05(Original Lease Price / Calculated Value) * (1+inflation delta)

(the extra .05 multiplier or some other factor to represent general capitalism/annual price increases by the broker)

[Cornishman]

schro - that is the most excellent summary of the problem as I can see it too. This shows that though I agree, my dad could have been a bit more ummm ... peaceful about his initial comments (sorry dad    ) but Sami - you must also accept a bit that the system is definitely flawed in the explanation that schro just gave.

[Tuckernut]

I have often wondered about pricing—especially if I look at buying an aircraft I am leasing.  It might show that I could buy my leased 777 for $100 Million but when I check the used market, I find I can buy a similar aircraft for $78 Million.  So I just return the leased one and purchase the used one.

I like the idea of occasionally doing a "one time offer" at a reduced lease or purchase price.  At any rate, it is surprising the the brokers prices are so often out of line with each other.

[Karl]

I understand why some leases go way up in price when leasing an aircraft short term; however, I do not understand when a game has fewer than several years of months to play until the end, an airline must pay for short term leases - since one cannot lease an aircraft beyond the end year of the game.

Am I mistaken?

The current Jet Age game has only a few more game months to play - one week in real world time.  Unfortunately, I have a few aircraft that have leases that expire a few months ahead of the end of the game.  I could dump or replace them with new leases.  However, if I lease an aircraft for only a few months, the price skyrockets.

Why can't the game be programmed so that existing leases can be extended long-range beyond the end date of the game for the usual  long-term discounts?  Why is an airline "punished" for leasing aircraft near the end of the game?

[gazzz0x2z]

Leasing 773s...

Some people like to hurt themselves. 

[swiftus27]

All I can say is ...

W  T  F   ?

I just had the leases increased for another year on some 773s in the AG game and the thieving ****'s have increased the leases from what was previously around $300,000 per month and has now become around $2.4 MILLION  per month. 

This could kill my relatively new airline. These are leases from the AI not some player that decided to be mean.  Is this correct?  Surely a system error ?

Any advice much appreciated.
Dave  (Thailandair)

Do you complain to your drug dealers that the first one was free why is the next one $1,000 a bag?  (I jest)

[tungstennedge]

Leasing 773s...

Some people like to hurt themselves. 

call me a masochist then

[Viscount Bailey]

Do you complain to your drug dealers that the first one was free why is the next one $1,000 a bag?  (I jest)

Wow, sorry Swifty, not many of us need to call up a drug dealer for anything. Still, I hope you recover soon    (I too jest)

Okay, okay, I went in a bit hard to start this - I admit and I apologised privately to Sami. I am just returning the last of those overprised 773s back to the lessor companies that took me for a 1yr long expensive ride... the joke's on them though... we served very hot curries on all the last flights we offered on those planes and oops... nobody got around to cleaning the lavatories before we sent their planes back ! 

On a lighter note, when these 773s are priced more reasonably as many are (between $500k to $1m per month) then there's plenty good money to be made by leasing them on routes such as I have where there are 5000 to 8000 pax per day on routes less than 1000nm. You just need to know when to lease 777s and when not to ! (as tungsten evidently also knows  )

[swiftus27]

please know I wrote (in jest) at the end of the comment. 

Means I was kidding. 

I understand what you are going through.   

The responses you are seeing above are due to the fact that so many that read the forums/discord are among the oldest players in the game.   

Leasing 777s is pretty much a recipe for disaster in AWS so they're responding accordingly.