Virtual Trucking Company

[Nejtun]

Hey all!
We Now have a Virtual Trucking Company (VTC) for American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2!
It is called Band Of Others Logistics and is set up on website called VTLOG, you can Join by clicking the banner below!

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There is some logging software which runs when you play ATS/ETS2 that reports in real time as you are playing to the site and shows a live feed of the job you are doing including your fuel usage, speed destination and Job length.

There is a live map for both games ATS HERE

and ETS2 HERE.


Also a Bank Screen,

which shows how much we have earned collectively including profits and expenses

There is a channel in the B2O discord dedicated to this VTC, a text channel for each title and a voice channel for each + one extra channel specifically for the VTC so feel free to make use of these!

An important note: This VTC has no impact whatsoever on your normal game, you can just play as normal on whatever version you happen to run. You do not need any specific DLC or Mods as the stats are just taken from the job you are doing,

You can be in Multiplayer or Single player so everyone can get involved!
When you join up, you are put directly into the members role, if you find there is something you don't have access to or cannot do on the site then please let me know so I can rectify it as this is new and a Work In Progress.

I will be streaming this a bunch as I hope a few other people will, the list of truck streamers is below and I will extend it as I get permission to add people to the stream list.
ATS/ETS2 Streamers:

Nejtun

All of this is just for fun and give a bit more depth to both of these Truck Simulators so the more that join the better!
Thanks to everyone that has helped to get this going from Discord to images and testing the service!
Nejtun.

 

[Kenadian]

Registered

 

[Nejtun]

Excellent There are a lot of features that I am going to try to integrate for twitch viewers, I shall be working on that over the weekend!

 

[Ogami Itto]

Interested, but trying to continue my leveling as well. How does that work out?

 

[Nejtun]

Interested, but trying to continue my leveling as well. How does that work out?

Nothing that happens in the VTC has any impact on your personal game, just play as normal!

 

[Brainling]

Do I need any mods or anything? Or just base ETS2?

 

[Nejtun]

Do I need any mods or anything? Or just base ETS2?

The base game is enough, but you are doing yourself a disservice without the DLC's of the extra countries! If you don't have any of it already both steam and CDkeys have various bundles although I cannot see the prices on steam as I own them all already.

 

[Brainling]

I have some of the DLC's but not all of them. I'll put them on my wishlist and grab the rest next time we get a sale.

 

[Kenadian]

B2O Logistics Logo

 

[Nejtun]

WOOO! thanks

 

[Kenadian]

So just to be clear, we need to request an API Key for this to work right?

 

[Nejtun]

after you have logged in with steam then click : Logit client in the left hand menu

after that , choose the live version of the logit client

it runs once and then that is it, it is not like crew chief or similar where you need to have it running while you play

your game and steam will do the rest each time you play, giving live stats and payments and what not!

 

[Kenadian]

I had to go here to find the Logit Client as it never displays in my Sidebar for some strange reason.

 

[Nejtun]

Our new VTC seems to be coming along nicely! We are up to 8 members now and moving steadily up the rankings
More are always welcome though and we are still missing a couple of people who play or have played ATS/ETS2 in the past.
@TokyoGwB and @Skid_Marc_ might want to consider joining up? It doesn't matter how little or how much you play and whatever level from single player to multiplayer, every little gets us further.
I cannot list everybody as I just don't have a big enough brain but all feel free to join!

VTLog did some updates yesterday I think, so if you uploaded an avatar before you may need to do it again as my picture was deleted and so was @Kenadian (dunno why!)

Thanks to everyone for taking part in this experiment, it has certainly made these sims a little more interesting for me at least and I hope it does for everybody else.

 

[Kinger]

Do we have any idea if only certain jobs get logged? I did 3 deliveries yesterday and only one was logged even though I received money in game for each.

 

[Nejtun]

Every job gets logged @Kinger the VTlog site was going through updates yesterday evening so it was down for a bit, there will be a new site soon, the old one is back up now though.

 

[Ogami Itto]

#63 VTC! We're doing it with everyone's help!

 

[Kenadian]

So we're officially a Top 50 Virtual Trucking Company as of last night.

I learned a fair amount about the way credits are handled at VTC last night however have little insight into what the best combination is to gain credits?

Previously my highest credit runs were 3580 and 3205 however I smashed them last night with a 5092 credit run.

If I were to guess on how to gain maximum credits it would be ticking as many of the boxes as possible when it comes to freight and distance.

I think it's pretty clear the longer the distance the more the credits however it appears as if combining freight categories is the way to go. For example, hauling High Value Cargo nets you decent credits however the payoff seems to be dwarfed by High Value/Fragile.

These are two clean equal length runs with one being High Value/Fragile and the other being simply High Value (my default haul), same distance and no mid-trip refueling:

1. https://vtlog.net/job/1241096 High Value/Fragile, 1450 km, economy 36.42, 5092 credits
2. https://vtlog.net/job/1236903 High Value, 1446 km, economy 41.09, 3580 credits

These are nearly identical runs with the exception of Cargo as mentioned however also a substantial gain in fuel economy calculated over distance.

Thanks to @ElektroVodka I finally learned how to save fuel in ETS2 and it may be very relevant to individual job credits.

I saved in the neighborhood of 7000 litres of fuel over the run simply by keeping revs down and essentially lugging the engine on flat terrain in 12th gear.

...

Now time for the nefarious, the system can unfortunately be cheesed.

There is a built in system withing ETS2 and ATS that allows for you to get the best price for your job and that is loading autosave upon incident.

I learned this last night quite by accident.

My last trip of the evening was a short 550 km High Value haul of forklifts. I ran a road block (as I've done before) however could not get past what lay a km down the road.

What lie in front of me blocking the entire road was a two lane fatality collision with a medic chopper blocking the roadway.

Of note, I think I even took damage as the event hitbox cast my truck into the guard rail. The hit wasn't enough to stall and I think would have been truck damage at most, it bears mention.

Since I was stuck and there was clearly no way out of it I just reverted to my last autosavee and took a detour when I came up to the initial roadblock.

VTC took no notice of my previous attempt as it seems clear now the job totals are tallied upon delivery.

It makes sense but it can clearly be taken advantage of.

I think what I'm going to do next is take the same job 3 times and test for the following:

1. Control run - a perfect run with only maintenance damage recorded (tires)
2. Refuel run - a perfect run with only maintenance damage recorded (tires) and mid-run refueling
3. Damage run - an imperfect run with trailer damage at time of delivery.

Please let me know if you're at all interested in the above?

When I see systems like this I really want to make the most of my time invested so I try to figure out what the best ROI is for my seat time.

 

[Nejtun]

Thanks for gathering that Ken, really useful to know some of those things!
Just before you do those last tests though, it is already a known thing that mid job refuelling screws us as a VTC not just the driver as you have to pay for fuel either way.
Also damage to the trailer/payload burns us quite badly as well (we have a 29k red job that tested this out already, no need to do it again!) it really wrecked our position at the start going from 42k in the bank to 13k!

The VTlog guys are still making adjustments so some of those "when" and " if " moments may change, but for now doing anything that costs money inside your control without a job on board is the best bet to not get extra costs.

Going to make sure I take from as many categories as possible in the future though! Thanks Ken

 

[Kenadian]

Alright, good to know.

I also checked some of the Top 50 individual credit earners and found some that made 9000+ credit runs. Some were running ADR of various classes so if you can find a High Value haul of this nature it may be worth it.

Having said that, these were 3000 km runs so I'm confident if you have decent fuel economy a trailer loaded with automobiles will net you over 10,000 credits over the same distance.

If I come across a job like that I'll take it to find out.