Employed drivers develop "habits"?

[harishw8r]

Yeah I thought about that too, never tried frieght market so restricted my discussion only to Cargo Market. Perhaps someone could try doing that in the Freight market and see if it works…

[Steve Pitts]

Is there a way to look at driver logs going back more than 7 days?

No, the game only records a week's worth of profit logs in the saved game data, although the oldest won't drop off until the driver completes a trip. For myself I work around this by taking unencrypted copies of the saved game data three or four times per game day and thus can always build a complete picture (given sufficient time to process the data - I have 3,814 saves for ETS2 to date so it can take half a day to read and aggregate all of that data and generate CSV files from it).

80 hour trips by multiple drivers, returning empty most of the time is frustrating!

If the driver is doing 80 hour trips then they are probably at level 6 in long distance and therefore are not afflicted by the issue your Nice to Birmingham drivers are - the problem goes away at level 6 because there is no distance limit. Once a driver is at that skill level then it should simply be a 10% chance of returning empty.

I THINK (no evidence to show) that we were discussing drivers without trailers (Freight Market)...

FWIW your hired hands do not use the Freight Market - the whole process is just the random number generator at work (or a series of dice rolls if you prefer)

[gaillard]

it should simply be a 10% chance of returning empty.

But, it is not... That is the problem.

It's more like 75%. Don't mind the number, I never counted, but it's much more than 1/2.

[Wakou22]

No, that is not the problem. The distance available is usually large enough.
There isn't any job at the moment the driver arrives, period.

Do the experiment yourself, pick a job and when arrived, look in that city for a job going back to where you came from.
Then note the success statistics.

Sorry, @gaillard but this is NOT correct! I was going to reply earlier, but @Steve Pitts, who knows far more about it than I ever will answered first.
This is not to do with the "Freight Market" that you and I use when we are looking for a return load. The AI drivers use a completely different system. Otherwise they would almost NEVER get a back-load. (1)
My guess is that the system ALWAYS generates a back-load to their origin, probably more than one. They are then subject to a random 'lottery' so that approx 10% of the time they do not take it.
The problem is that sometimes the out-load is precisely on the distance limit applicable to that driver, and that the back-load(s) available are slightly over that, making them "impossible".
Let us both try an experiment. Look at the city where you drivers are habitually going to, and failing to find a back load, and report back the distance. My guess is that the figures will be revealing!
In your case:

Example, I am now in Madrid.
My Best Choice is a trailer for Karlskrona.
However when arriving, there is absolutely no job in Karlskrona for Madrid.

In my case, Riga-Palermo and Nice-Birmingham.
ps, this seems to happen with drivers on 5 long-distance points. My drivers also use mainly owned trailers, but sometimes 'choose' not to.

(1) It is clear that AI drivers do not use the same market. If you consider that for that to work, then at all times (or 90% of times), EVERY city, or town etc would have to have available a load to EVERY other place in the game with a garage, (inc all DLC'S not to mention Pro-Mods and other map-extensions !) This would be an astronomical number of jobs to be generated and available!

[Wakou22]

I just did my two:
Riga-Palermo is 3217 Km
Nice Birmingham is 1547 Km
(I could not do Madrid-Karlsrona, I do not have the Iberia DLC )
Both trips involve a short ferry crossing.
I don't know what this teaches us, if anything!
One thing I wondered, on the world-map/satnav there is an option to set "locations to avoid"
If I set, eg. Birmingham as a place to be avoided (a good rule in real-life as well as in-game! )
Would that exclusion apply to my drivers as well?

[Madkine]

Would that exclusion apply to my drivers as well?

No it will not.

[Wakou22]

TY, @Madkine , I thought probably not!

[derrrr]

I have a bunch of drivers mostly going to / from Vyborg, Kouvola and Faro. Huelva seems to be getting popular aswell.

What buggs me is that sometimes they seem to "choose" low paying cargo (like empty pallets) from their garage's location just to get the max distance.

It would be nice to go deeper into the game's economy.

[derrrr]

Look at this guy... bending the rules...

[harishw8r]

Random occurrence… have seen this too