Guest Brain has Coaster Obsession?

[CaladanRake]

Hey Folks,

So I'm building a new park, still learning my way around building realistic coasters and such. I had a park going, developing the first quadrant of it. Thrill rides, family rides, three coasters for varying groups. All was going swell, money was raining in (I'm only playing on medium challenge right now). Then I built 2 new coasters in a different section of the park as the first two parts of that area. These coasters I built with lower excitement/fear ratings and no inversions so that kids would ride them.

No problems there, people FLOCKED to the rides. But now they just go back and forth between those 2 new rides, and my first 3 coasters. My thrill rides/family rides basically get ignored now. Literally the people just seem to be doing a rotating circle between coasters.

What gives? Before my thrill rides had full ques, now most of them 10-15 people in line at most. Don't even get me started on the family rides, they're a ghost town.

So, what am I missing here? Why did this happen?

 

[smelly]

I have the same issue, I think the rides are meant to be more popular when first built hence the influx but the guests then decide that the coaster is more exciting than the flat so the coaster always wins. Seems like a balancing issue. The same can be found with the log flume, the guests will love it. If you build flats adjacent to the popular rides the guests will choose the flat once they decide the coaster queue is too long. I think that the guest Ai needs to be programmed so that they actually seek out a mix of rides rather than just judging on stats.

 

[Abletudu]

It seems to me, and I may be wrong in this, but at real theme parks the coasters are usually more popular than the flats. When the park gets a new flat ride it may be crowded for a time, but after awhile the majority of people gravitate to the coasters in lieu of the flats.

 

[cerealfruitcakes]

I'm going to agree with Parkmaker, most flat rides at parks aren't busy compared to the roller coasters & water rides; log flume/water rapids. Although, if you have a good 5,000+ guests, your flat rides should fill up pretty good.

 

[SilverArrow]

Well, in real amusement parks and theme parks, E-ticket rides are what draw the audience, some people even justify the trip to the park for a single E-ride.

In amusement parks the archtypical E-ticket ride are coasters, although some water rides can be too (shoot-the-chutes, log flumes and rapids).

In theme parks the archtypical E-ticket ride are dark rides, they can be water based like flumes (think of Pirates of the Caribbean, It's a small world, Jurassic Park River Adventure) or tracked based (like Indiana Jones and the temple of the forbidden eye, haunted mansion, Peter Pan's Flight, Epcot's test track, etc.), or even trackless (Mystic Manor).

Usually flat rides and non-E-ticket are grouped around the E-ticket rides, at a ratio of 2-3 flat rides per E-ticket one. Just check how real life parks are set and you'll understand how to set the rides in a similar fashion in Planet Coaster (and yes, Frontier did simulate it right [up]).

 

[seeker7]

I don't believe most visitors to a themepark would ride the same thing eight times in a row. Guests fluctuating between my 4 coasters and pretty mch ignoring everything else also doesn't seem right.

 

[SilverArrow]

I don't believe most visitors to a themepark would ride the same thing eight times in a row. Guests fluctuating between my 4 coasters and pretty mch ignoring everything else also doesn't seem right.

Hah I'm not sure what other people do, but I have done that in real life in Disneyland Paris in BTM and in PortAventura's Stampida and Tutuki Splash, usually during launch time or late afternoon.

 

[Replica]

I have sort of a similar problem in a sense in my Hardest difficulty park.

The guest generation is hilariously low, as is kind of the whole shtick of that difficulty level, but the problem ended up being that guests don't want to really explore the expansion of my park, and prefer lingering around the entrance area that has two coasters and a couple of thrill rides.

Despite the area further in having 2 new coasters and several new gentle & thrill rides, those areas are largely deserted and are actually just a waste of money if anything.
The Tiamat I have there has like, not even 4-8 guests per train, and the Canyon Runner had a total of one guest over the span of four months.

The guests I tend to have lingering around seem content just riding the same two coasters and thrill ride over and over rather than going to the new rides, kinda wondering how the algorithm is working, ie, if they discern between rides they have been to vs haven't been to, or just go for the closest best thing or what.

 

[SuperBo3]

sadly whenever a park gets a good selection of coasters and/or water rides the rest of the park dies, its a shame its like this it really kills it for me trying to build a great big park its been like this since i bought it at launch

 

[Abletudu]

A lot of people tend to design the parks with the coasters and other large draw rides at the far side of the park so that the peeps will travel further.

 

[SuperBo3]

A lot of people tend to design the parks with the coasters and other large draw rides at the far side of the park so that the peeps will travel further.

that doesnt help really from my parks, they got no problem walking from one end of the park to next to ride the big coasters ignoring all the other rides on the way there (sure they travel further but whats the point when the end result is the same?), the more big coasters you got the more other rides are ignored in the end the guests just go from one coaster to the next if you have like 5+ big ones leaving the rest mostly unused

 

[Abletudu]

that doesnt help really from my parks, they got no problem walking from one end of the park to next to ride the big coasters ignoring all the other rides on the way there (sure they travel further but whats the point when the end result is the same?), the more big coasters you got the more other rides are ignored in the end the guests just go from one coaster to the next if you have like 5+ big ones leaving the rest mostly unused

Quite a few posts I noticed was that the peeps didn't travel very far into the park, so that is why I made that observation. But isn't it pretty much the same in real parks too?

 

[seeker7]

Quite a few posts I noticed was that the peeps didn't travel very far into the park, so that is why I made that observation. But isn't it pretty much the same in real parks too?

No idea what parks you've been to but from my experiene no it's not.

 

[Replica]

Quite a few posts I noticed was that the peeps didn't travel very far into the park, so that is why I made that observation. But isn't it pretty much the same in real parks too?

If the farthest reaches are deserted and have nothing? Yes.

If the farthest reaches have like 3 coasters and an entire new section of the park? Of course not.

 

[Sherrie]

My guests brains are pretty small. They also flocked to the coasters, (2 Katz rides) blocking paths in their thousands, I decided to bump up the price to deter most of them so I upped it to $50 per ride! Well, the guests moaned about the price, flocked to the ATMS then flocked back to the rides to throw all their hard earned cash on 1 ride. Pretty dumb.

 

[random name]

I'm seeing the same thing happening in my park. I have been placing the coasters in the corners and at the back of the park to draw the peeps through and spent a huge amount of time creating an inviting opening sequence with family-oriented flat rides, but the whole area collapsed and the shops closed as the crowds stampede to the coasters and clog access to them.

I think this is unbalanced and from my own experience in parks, you made a point of seeing/doing as much as you could during the day, within limits. Teens aren't going to go on teacups, but lots of families and pass holders will.

Actually, it's the devs who have the coaster obsession. I believe this is part and parcel with the coaster fetish/obsession which clearly rules all the dev decision-making. The only area of the game which is fully developed and polished are the coasters. There are so many varieties, more than I ever wanted or cared to know existed, and all lovingly detailed (with massive time spent developing all that), and a first-rate track building system.

The entire rest of the game is an afterthought and a stepchild, and all the problems never get fixed or proper attention paid to. You still can't copy/paste and there is no universal bulldozer, no management to speak of, a spastic path tool, bare-bones rides and scenery options, but: coasters! Have we got coasters!

Granted, it is named Planet Coaster, but a bit of balance with the rest would be nice.

 

[Bullethead]

What gives? Before my thrill rides had full ques, now most of them 10-15 people in line at most. Don't even get me started on the family rides, they're a ghost town.

So, what am I missing here? Why did this happen?

My $0.02....

Customers know the stats of each ride for excitement, fear, and nausea. They also know where all the rides are (because they get a map of the park, I guess). They decide to go on a specific ride based on its stats and head straight to it passing everything on the way unless they suddenly have an attack of the munchies or whatever. That's just how the world works in PC.

So..... All the 1-piece thrill rides have pretty low stats across the board. It's no problem at all to build a ride with better stats. Better stats means the built ride is more attractive to guests. So that's where they go.

When you think about it, it HAS to be this way for career and challenge modes to work. In those modes, your objective is NOT to have a balanced number of customers all across the park, it's to make enough money to win the scenario. The way to make mo' money is to build high-capacity, high-throughput rides that are very attractive to customers and for which you can charge high prices. And not only can you easily build rides that are way more attractive to customers than the stock rides, but you can also build them with MUCH higher throughput. So when all the guests clog up your big, expensive, high-volume, totally sick coasters and ignore everything else, that's a GOOD thing. That's what you built the coasters for. It means your evil plan is succeeding.

Seriously, if the quality of the ride didn't influence customer behavior, there'd be no point in building excellent coasters. You could just plunk down any old thing and making mo' money would be reduced simply to spamming whatever stock ride was cheapest to build. So it pays to make quality rides. But that means, in the end, that if you play one of the game modes centered around money, you're basically forces into killing much of your early park.

This is why I much prefer sandbox. With money not being a problem, I can set my goal actually to be an even distribution of guests at all my stuff. But to do that, I have to NOT build totally excellent rides. I actually try to keep excitement at 4 or a bit less (yellow), fear at 2-3 (yellow), and nausea at 1 or less (green). These stats are similar to those of the stock 1-piece rides so they can still compete.

I also try to make nearly every built ride family-friendly. This means I hardly ever make coasters that kids can't ride. And for the types they can, I also make sure to keep fear below 4. Kids won't ride a coaster type that's allowable for them if the fear is greater than 4.

The reason I focus on families so much is that they make up about 1/3 of the total customer base. These consist of 2 adults, 1-2 kids, and 0-1 teen. The adults decide where they all go but the kid decides what they can actually ride. Families will go to attractive adult-tean coasters, or "family" coasters with fear greater than 4, and then turn around at the gate because the kids can't or won't go on it. But if nearly everything is OK for kids and about equally attractive, that doesn't happen and all customers go to everything you've got.

 

[cerealfruitcakes]

It's pretty interesting that the same "queue" problems we had in RCT3 is now a common issue for Planet Coaster. Same developer, same problem only the difference is with RCT3 it was blamed on groups & their needs. For Planet Coaster it just seems to be blamed on........?