Queue scenery quality for the whole queue

[Everfades]

Hi there,

I have built a coaster with a long straight waiting line which goes through the whole coaster (basically the entrance and the end of the queue are the oppoiste sides of the coaster). You walk through a fantasy themed forest with a witch hut, a small lakes with a dragon guarding a chest etc. And the area where you get on the coaster has a large building around it with plants growing over it.

But the queue scenery quality ONLY takes into account things you place at the ticket booth from the queue!!! It literally is just 0% scenery quality even though the whole queue except the entrance looks AMAZING. And if I place a relativly small house and a few plants at the ticket booth it goes to 100% - and I can delete EVERYTHING ELSE and it doesn't change the rating in the slightest. That system is HORRIBLE for long queues. It teaches you that you queue can look like a garbage dump and only the entrance needs to look great for it to gain 100%.

This needs to be fixed before release! Anything around the queue should count towards scenery quality. Maybe make a threshold for total quality of ~50% if only the ticket booth has scenery. That way you would actually have to make your WHOLE QUEUE beautiful - not just the entrance. Yes, the entrance and maybe exit (towards the coaster) of a queue should be the crucial parts, but they should not be the ONLY parts which matter. Have you ever been to a great reallife amusement park? Most good ones have AMAZING queues. And if the whole waiting area would have NOTHING in it and only the entrance looked great I would not call that quality scenery, I would call that lazy and boring. You want to see something the whole time while waiting, not just for the first minute.

I really hope this gets fixed! Please comment and endorse this a lot to allow the devs to actually notice this thread. It really destroys the whole concept of queue scenery quality if only the first two meters count and the rest can be a boring desert and you still get 100% - or you have nothing at the entrance but the most beautiful queue area and get 0-10% scenery quality. Those are both really bad design descisions and the scenery quality system should NOT work that way.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

I think they did it this way because the ticket booth at the path is where yo try to attract peeps to a ride. It's where you advertise, essentially. It's where you put all your peacock feathers to attract attention.

 

[widlanquebec]

I think they did it this way because the ticket booth at the path is where yo try to attract peeps to a ride. It's where you advertise, essentially. It's where you put all your peacock feathers to attract attention.

Yeah, but I still didn't like this. The entire queue should be evaluate to set the scenery quality... the ticket booth could count for more, but the rest should also be taken into account.

 

[harag]

Yeah, but I still didn't like this. The entire queue should be evaluate to set the scenery quality... the ticket booth could count for more, but the rest should also be taken into account.

I agree with this - the entrance should be something like up to 50% then the actual queue should be extra.

 

[Everfades]

I agree with this - the entrance should be something like up to 50% then the actual queue should be extra.

Exactly. It's not like people would only react to the entrance. After they have been on the ride they tell others if they liked it and if the queue looked amazing they talk about that, too. And if the queue is just a barren dessert of boring nothingness they will tell that to their family and friends, too. In large realife parks you wait at least 30 minutes at every ride. If all the queues look boring you will start to hate it. The largest part of your time in a themepark you will stand in queues. If they don't entertain you in the slightest then you will get annoyed by them really fast. If they look amazing it will take a lot longer for you to get annoyed by the waiting time. And most reallife themeparks only make you pay upfront one time and not for each coaster. I know only one park which had you pay for each ride instead of upfront and I've been to over 20 different theme parks so far, I'm even in an official coaster club which gets VIP tickets for parks with new rides all around the world and we post reviews and write blogs about the new themes and rides.
But even if every coaster has a price to ride it you would FOCUS on the entrance but you want peeps to come back to it. And just having a good ride and good entrance is not enough for that.
Saying 50% for the entrance and 50% for the rest for queue scenery quality seems like a realistic value. Maybe instead even change it to two different values. One 0-100% for entrance and another 0-100% for the queue. Entrance quality could affect people who didn't visit it yet in happiness and likeniness to ride it and coaster scenery quality, queue scenery quality and coaster quality itself would affect if they liked it AND if they want to ride the coaster a second time. [yesnod]

 

[Abletudu]

I often found myself wondering about the queue rating because it seemed like no matter how mush scenery I used, the rating never changed. I didn't know it only applied to the booth.

 

[Zetachron]

... The largest part of your time in a themepark you will stand in queues ...

This! To rephrase it: You spent 10x times more in queues than actually riding. The ride is the thrilling short final of the queue. Any real life park has to make the queues more attractive, because most people also take waiting time into consideration before deciding if they go to the ride or not. At least that's happening at successful real life parks.

I'd say the ride value would be more like: Ride Thrillfactor - Waiting time + Waiting Scenery Entertainment time.

 

[harag]

I often found myself wondering about the queue rating because it seemed like no matter how mush scenery I used, the rating never changed. I didn't know it only applied to the booth.

Yes it's only the entrance and not the actual queue which is a real shame as I've seen some great queue lines in the game people have done (and I try myself) as standing in queue is boring..

 

[Fender]

This! To rephrase it: You spent 10x times more in queues than actually riding. The ride is the thrilling short final of the queue. Any real life park has to make the queues more attractive, because most people also take waiting time into consideration before deciding if they go to the ride or not. At least that's happening at successful real life parks.

I'd say the ride value would be more like: Ride Thrillfactor - Waiting time + Waiting Scenery Entertainment time.

This. I kept spending my time in PC decorating the queue lines. While I agree that the front should be scored a bit (you gotta pull the guests in!), you do indeed spend most of your time in the queue. In my opinion, Disney parks have some of the best queue decor, and it made it feel like the lines were shorter than they really were because there was so much to take in.

It might not ever happen, but it would be neat if it scored the entrance in order to pull more guests in, but then the queue to raise guest happiness (or something to that effect), since guests will sometimes complain about how long the queue lines are.

 

[Everfades]

Yes it's only the entrance and not the actual queue which is a real shame as I've seen some great queue lines in the game people have done (and I try myself) as standing in queue is boring..

If I create a park which exactly uses the system as it is right now to test out how parks in the campaign would look like where you min/max - it looks like crap. One huge scenery building at the entrance then 100 meters of nothingness through a desert and then get on a short ride with the same huge scenery building. Due to this I noticed that coaster scenery works in the same way. What coaster scenery should be like: automatically devide the coaster into long sections (more sections for longer coasters) which have a rating from 0-100 for scenery. Then you add up all scenery scores and devide them by the number of sections used in the equation! Instead it counts the whole ride as one entity! That means you can have a 3 minute long coaster with NO scenery and only place all scenery at one part of the track. Noone would give that a 100% scenery score in real life. You need to balance out scenery over the whole track. I really hope the devs implement a section like system for queues and coasters. That way you would need good scenery along the way but you would still be able to have short strings without any scenery as each section counts as one entitity. Right now queues have just the ticket booth instead of the whole path and coasters only count from 0-100 for ALL scenery around it instead of section based!

PLEASE devs, add a section based scenery quality system instead of the horrible system we have right now. Min/maxing in the campaign (which you have to do in really hard campaigns and restricted money) would create horrible looking parks. With a section based system we would still have nice looking parks if we min/max for the best value. It should NEVER be encouraged to put no effort into creativity in a themepark game. Right now the system tells me that all the work I put into queues and into balancing the scenery around my coasters would be worth NOTHING. You need to give the player feedback that he/she did well and should actually ENCOURAGE creativity and balanced scenery. [yesnod][yesnod][yesnod] (sure, people can still just place walls all around the coasters and queues as you can only go by scenery cost but if scenery quality is section based we at least are encouraged to build something everywhere instead of leaving barren wasteland almost everywhere [down][down][down])

 

[Angelis1]

I agree with this - the entrance should be something like up to 50% then the actual queue should be extra.

50% for the entrance and 50% for the queue seems fair to me. [yesnod][up]

 

[Zetachron]

50% for the entrance and 50% for the queue seems fair to me. [yesnod][up]

I'd say a luckless ride with almost no visitors needs 100% for the entrance, while a good ride with a long and full queue needs 100% for the queue. So the entrance decoration should attract newcomers, while the queue decoration should increase happiness and help increasing the ride value after riding for the people (remembering the ride as good and thus increasing the return chance and the spread of good word).

Each decoration has a different effect and type: The bigger, louder and more thrilling the entrance deco, the more the attraction for newcomers. While the queue deco must repeat to keep up the interest. Each queue deco should keep or push up happiness in its short range until the next queue deco adds. So for queue deco the density of placements is also important.

 

[Angelis1]

I'd say a luckless ride with almost no visitors needs 100% for the entrance, while a good ride with a long and full queue needs 100% for the queue. So the entrance decoration should attract newcomers, while the queue decoration should increase happiness and help increasing the ride value after riding for the people (remembering the ride as good and thus increasing the return chance and the spread of good word).

Each decoration has a different effect and type: The bigger, louder and more thrilling the entrance deco, the more the attraction for newcomers. While the queue deco must repeat to keep up the interest. Each queue deco should keep or push up happiness in its short range until the next queue deco adds. So for queue deco the density of placements is also important.

The longer the queue, the higher the percentage of importance of the theming increases ?

Why not.
I like the idea. [yesnod]

 

[Crowdpleaser]

This doesn't have anything to do with the Queue but i think it sorta fits in: Is the Coaster taking Scenery around the Track into Account? In the Excitement Rating i mean. This was the Case in the Past, but i don't know how it is today. You would get rewarded for dressing the Actual Ride as well as Dressing the Queue and the Station. And relative boring Ride Systems can get very Exciting (Dark Rides for Example). Do you know if this is the Case or not?

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Crowdpleaser, scenery doesn't effect excitement directly. I does increase desireablility though. I've had a couple coasters that just barely had riders. Then I decorated the heck out of them, and now everyone wants to ride them (but the ratings didn't change). I believe this is true to a degree with flat rides as well. Scenery helps increase desire.

 

[Crowdpleaser]

Crowdpleaser, scenery doesn't effect excitement directly. I does increase desireablility though. I've had a couple coasters that just barely had riders. Then I decorated the heck out of them, and now everyone wants to ride them (but the ratings didn't change). I believe this is true to a degree with flat rides as well. Scenery helps increase desire.

That's a shame Because for example Headchopper elements make Coasters more exciting. I hope they consider taking this in account also.

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Me too. It did in the past, so...fingers crossed.

 

[Zetachron]

We need construction help for an "entertainment queue":

You could connect a so called queue entertainment object near or to a queue path section in build mode. The build mode would render the number of queue path sections that now get an increased entertainment value from that element in range and store the increased entertainment value directly into the queue path, so when a guest walks over a queue path his happiness would increase and walking inside a queue path without entertainment value his happiness would decrease over time.

Examples:
A normal queue path would have a negative entertainment value of -2.
A sound speaker with a certain listen radius plays themed music that lets the player feel good. All queue path elements in range get a +1 entertain added to -2.
An audiovisual screenplay with movie clips showing themed play performance could get +2 entertain in the range of the viewing.
Some animatronics could deliver 3d action show elements with +1 entertainment in range.

So to keep people from loosing happiness inside a waiting queue you could play some good music with animatronics near or have a video screen in range. If you happen to have the people walk through a panoramic video dome with a queue and the video show is good, than the queue would even attract visitors with a +1 value.

The possibilities of making people happy inside queues are endless and some of the best parks use a lot of them.

 

[Casiquire]

The reason I agree with the OP rather than BItter Jeweler's reply that the entrance attracts guests to the ride is that the guests' own thoughts seem to contradict that theory--they talk about how boring a queue is while they're waiting in it. If that's the case, then the WHOLE queue should affect the scenery rating, not just the entrance, because the guests don't complain about the entrance, they complain about the boring wait.

 

[Everfades]

The reason I agree with the OP rather than BItter Jeweler's reply that the entrance attracts guests to the ride is that the guests' own thoughts seem to contradict that theory--they talk about how boring a queue is while they're waiting in it. If that's the case, then the WHOLE queue should affect the scenery rating, not just the entrance, because the guests don't complain about the entrance, they complain about the boring wait.

I really hope they improve the scenery quality system by making it section based. Just having different sections depending on the length of your queue which need scenery and can go from 0-100 each. Same for the coaster itself, but with longer sections to make it easier to manage your scenery around the track. [yesnod] Right now with just entrance of the queue for queue scenery and trainentrance for coaster scenery counting it feels utterly broken. This might not be an issue in sandbox - but in any campaign or challenge mode this system makes you NOT build any scenery except for those two points because you don't "receive" any benefits from building anywhere else around your coasters and queues. And money is key in campaign and challenge modes which should be the meat of the game. [sour]