Safty recalls

[mortatiss]

Had a cool idea.

Safety recalls I've just launched a new car line sold 30k units and bang tragedy stuck break failure family killed!

options

1) I get sued for damages and take very bad publicity
2) I settle out of court much higher $$$ but no bad publicity
3) voluntary recall to fix issue $$$
4) no recall (could happen again) (Court ordered recall/scrap of production line. or criminal charges ULTRA bad publicity)

what you think?

[noeraver]

I think it's an interesting idea in terms of throwing wrenches into players' best-laid plans. What if these types of events happened depending on quality?

As a player, I like the idea of having to rapidly shift my focus in order to solve "random event" type problems such as recalls. It keeps players form getting too comfortable.

[Killrob]

Recalls will probably make their way into the game, but indeed will not be entirely random. There will be a QA part, where you can invest money and set higher standards, which would lessen the risk for something like this happening. Quality ties into that as well to some degree. How exactly it is going to work we don't know yet though, but we have pretty fleshed out ideas about it. It will NOT be entirely random (which personally, I would hate if it was).

[maffc]

Yes I agree that totally random would be a huge put off, the player must have some influence.
Build a rushed car with poor testing and build then expect problems, but your high end well thought out car, tested and built to exacting standards should expect to be largely trouble free

[noeraver]

A related question:
Would there be prestige penalties for your brand if you handle recalls poorly? Could we lessen these effect by handling it well? I know it's not fleshed out, but I'm just thinking what the specific effect would be in terms of game mechanics.

For example, Toyota had an issue with throttle failure in 2009-2011, and they handled it really well, so their sales numbers barely took a hit (their stock value wasn't too damaged either, if I recall correctly). Will we be able to throw lots of money at the problem in order to effectively appease our customers, and prevent our brand prestige from dropping at all?

Thanks guys for being so open with your development process.

[Killrob]

Yes, there need to be ways to handle these situations in different ways... for better or worse