Refunds

I think with the shops, you just want to have smaller clusters around the Zoo. Basically, the guests dont want to walk super far to find a bathroom or a refreshing beverage. In my Zoo I currently have 1 larger plaza in the center and as my Zoo gets bigger I plan to have smaller satellite guest areas further in to the park.

I kinda wish we had smaller vendors like pretzel carts and water fountains for these situations where I want to help my guests but dont want to invest space in a full facility.
 
Glad to find out what's causing the problem! Fixed up my speakers so hopefully my guests will start to rage less.

  • Might be an idea to add a negative though along the lines of 'it's too noisy here, I'm getting a headache' or ' there's too many speakers, I can't hear myself think'. This would allow people to pinpoint overlapping educational speakers are causing an issue.
  • Maybe add some refund information to the help menu - nothing comes up if you search. It says if they're unhappy for a time they leave, but doesn't mention them being allowed to get a full refund on their tickets! Still not sure if they can refund their shop purchases/donations as well.
  • Education view/guest education also doesn't mention the huge negative for overlapping speakers - it just says they won't receive an education boost. The negative is mentioned in the education items section, but I feel it's also worth mentioning in the other help sections.
 
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On the moving shops issue - it may just be the cost of the ground being slightly changed underneath or paths being connected. Don't know for sure, just a guess!
Good idea but it did not work for me with flatten terrain turned off, still says $2000 fee.
 
Hiya,

So it seems like for most of the save files we were sent, there are overlapping educational speakers; this means that guests who walk into this overlapped area have a rapid drop in happiness - causing them to leave and want their money back.
Please check the Education heatmap, and if there's anything red in there: fix it!

Also, if you're running a bad zoo in general, that could cause a lot of unhappy guests too: not enough shops, too much litter, and expensive tickets; also, not having enough shops or having them all in one area only, and staff facilities being far away. Be sure to optimise your zoos in terms of placement: it's important!

We'll continue to look into other possibilities in the meantime :)
Cheers!
So are you saying that the "Refunds" line item is unhappy guests who demanded their park entrance fee back? Reason I ask is, well couple reasons but mainly because the entrance fee is quite small so the high numbers people are seeing for Refunds seems odd. Unless it is more than the entrance fee. Secondly, well I mean I guess I'm fine with it but it seems rather unrealistic. That's like going to Animal Kingdom then complaining that the conservation signs were confusing so you should get your money back. You'd get a nice belly laugh at that one!
 
So are you saying that the "Refunds" line item is unhappy guests who demanded their park entrance fee back? Reason I ask is, well couple reasons but mainly because the entrance fee is quite small so the high numbers people are seeing for Refunds seems odd. Unless it is more than the entrance fee. Secondly, well I mean I guess I'm fine with it but it seems rather unrealistic. That's like going to Animal Kingdom then complaining that the conservation signs were confusing so you should get your money back. You'd get a nice belly laugh at that one!
Quite. I'd like to see the staff's reaction at my local zoo if I went to the front desk and demanded a refund because it rained/snowed while I was at the zoo. Rain/snow seems to be the new top reason my guests start demanding refunds. Any idea if the guests will actually use shelters in the rain? I'm already selling umbrellas. Maybe I should have built my zoo in a desert?
 
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Quite. I'd like to see the staff's reaction at my local zoo if I went to the front desk and demanded a refund because it rained/snowed while I was at the zoo. Rain/snow seems to be the new top reason my guests start demanding refunds. Any idea if the guests will actually use shelters in the rain? I'm already selling umbrellas. Maybe I should have built my zoo in a desert?

They do not. I did some testing with this in Beta. For example I built habitats with enclosures that people could go into and view animals while getting out of the rain. In real life when it rains these indoor setups tend to become more popular and crowded. Same with gift shops and the like. But in PZ when it rained there was no difference in where the guests went. They did not congregate under shelter or to indoor exhibits as expected. They just continued their normal behavior but with umbrellas. And when it snows they just ignore it.
 
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Thank's for the idea with the speakers, this helped with the problem somewhat for me. But to be honest - it's quite ridiculous that more than half my guests would demand a full refund, because two speakers overlap in an area that is not even accessible to guests. That's about as unrealistic as I could imagine.
I guess I'm fine with guests demanding refunds for "important" reasons, like unhappy animals or not having their needs met at all. But this? It has to be a balancing issue or bug...

Edit: I have to correct myself. Fixing the speakers seems to have done nothing at all, still getting high amounts of refunds.
 
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Thank's for the idea with the speakers, this helped with the problem somewhat for me. But to be honest - it's quite ridiculous that more than half my guests would demand a full refund, because two speakers overlap in an area that is not even accessible to guests. That's about as unrealistic as I could imagine.
I guess I'm fine with guests demanding refunds for "important" reasons, like unhappy animals or not having their needs met at all. But this? It has to be a balancing issue or bug...

Edit: I have to correct myself. Fixing the speakers seems to have done nothing at all, still getting high amounts of refunds.
It lowered from 50-80k to 16-30k refunds for me when I fixed my speakers, so it did make a noticable difference. Honestly I find the guests in this game way too needy; I'm really starting to miss ZT2 guests and access to proper gift shops/restaurants. If they were cross they just went home instead of refunding everything! I want to play franchise for the animal trading but the guests constantly refunding, whining and breaking things is starting to get irritating.

I'm sure people that played planet coaster have no issues managing the guests, but I'm finding it tedious when I just want to mess around with the animals.

TIL that apparently guests hate seeing multiple tiger habitats (full of baby tigers I might add), that probably isn't helping with my guests (I also loved the second guests though train):
bkLzZIj.png
 
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Thank's for the idea with the speakers, this helped with the problem somewhat for me. But to be honest - it's quite ridiculous that more than half my guests would demand a full refund, because two speakers overlap in an area that is not even accessible to guests. That's about as unrealistic as I could imagine.
I guess I'm fine with guests demanding refunds for "important" reasons, like unhappy animals or not having their needs met at all. But this? It has to be a balancing issue or bug...

Edit: I have to correct myself. Fixing the speakers seems to have done nothing at all, still getting high amounts of refunds.
I agree. My healthy Zoo was almost completely brought to ruins because of 4 or 5 overlapping speakers. Once I removed those, everything was great again. I am very happy my issue is resolved, but it is indeed quite ridiculous that 5 speakers can destroy a balanced zoo.
 
Hey there,
I registered extra for answering this question because I was very frustrated myself and my boyfriend found out by searching a look on the internet.
The first thing you guys already mentioned is right - overlapping speakers are a big problem and the refunds will go down if you fix that.
Second thing I tried out (and it worked) is reducing pickpocketing. If people get pickpocketed (as that right haha?) they will want a refund. I put 10 extra safety guards into my zoo and it helped A LOT! Next thing is to put up cameras. Vandalism is also bad and can also be prevented by those two.

The thing is I can assure you this helps because I never had overlapping speakers, so there was nothing to fix for me. But putting more security guards in my zoo paid off easy and the money they get was easy compensated by paying a lot less refunds.
 
Hey there,
I registered extra for answering this question because I was very frustrated myself and my boyfriend found out by searching a look on the internet.
The first thing you guys already mentioned is right - overlapping speakers are a big problem and the refunds will go down if you fix that.
Second thing I tried out (and it worked) is reducing pickpocketing. If people get pickpocketed (as that right haha?) they will want a refund. I put 10 extra safety guards into my zoo and it helped A LOT! Next thing is to put up cameras. Vandalism is also bad and can also be prevented by those two.

The thing is I can assure you this helps because I never had overlapping speakers, so there was nothing to fix for me. But putting more security guards in my zoo paid off easy and the money they get was easy compensated by paying a lot less refunds.

I think crowds are also a killer. My first try-out zoo was very simple/compact with a small area in the center (think its about 35x70 meters of path) surrounded by 4 enclosures. When I have 2000+ customers bunched up in the small area between 4 pens they just love breaking my bins/benches. I have security cameras over the top of the main bench breaking areas but my guests could care less.

Could be related to the fact that it's also incredibly hard to fit in enough food stands in such a small area, as they can only serve tiny amounts amounts of people at a time - I really, really miss the large gift shops and restaurants from zt2 that could handle a tonne of guests.

Sadly, it feels like the games current mechanics just highly punish you for building more compact zoos. Seems it's better to build large sprawly zoos with lots of branching wide open paths.
 
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I think crowds are also a killer. My first try-out zoo was very simple/compact with a small area in the center (think its about 35x70 meters of path) surrounded by 4 enclosures. When I have 2000+ customers bunched up in the small area between 4 pens they just love breaking my bins/benches. I have security cameras over the top of the main bench breaking areas but my guests could care less.

Could be related to the fact that it's also incredibly hard to fit in enough food stands in such a small area, as they can only serve tiny amounts amounts of people at a time - I really, really miss the large gift shops and restaurants from zt2 that could handle a tonne of guests.

Sadly, it feels like the games current mechanics just highly punish you for building more compact zoos. Seems it's better to build large sprawly zoos with lots of branching wide open paths.
Thanks for that info!
The crowding problem just doesn't get better with larger zoos. It took me forever to find out that customers more tend to visit new shops than new exhibits. And still - they are crowded in one small area in the beginning of the zoo. I also built splitting paths there, but the game just can't handle it.
I built a new franchise jungle zoo and built it more compact, but with a large entrance area which helped a bit.
But in my big africa zoo which I am very proud of (but is currently crashing, my computer will be upgraded) the crowds in the entrance area are just insane and I think the overlapping of people makes the game crash.

The Africa picture is the large zoo, but people hardly go to the "end" - or is it just because they seperate so much that I don't notice? Because there ARE people, but for an African elephant exhibit it's just a ridiculous small amount...
And they mostly stay in one area with a lot of shops and not so amazing animals. But in the entrance area...they just overlap and it seems like they "spawn" out of themselves...looks very strange. (I mean look at the third picture! Frontier should do something about it!)
The second picture is the "uglier" more compact zoo that also fits 5000 people now and they don't "overlap" as much!
 

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Thanks for that info!
The crowding problem just doesn't get better with larger zoos. It took me forever to find out that customers more tend to visit new shops than new exhibits. And still - they are crowded in one small area in the beginning of the zoo. I also built splitting paths there, but the game just can't handle it.
I built a new franchise jungle zoo and built it more compact, but with a large entrance area which helped a bit.
But in my big africa zoo which I am very proud of (but is currently crashing, my computer will be upgraded) the crowds in the entrance area are just insane and I think the overlapping of people makes the game crash.

The Africa picture is the large zoo, but people hardly go to the "end" - or is it just because they seperate so much that I don't notice? Because there ARE people, but for an African elephant exhibit it's just a ridiculous small amount...
And they mostly stay in one area with a lot of shops and not so amazing animals. But in the entrance area...they just overlap and it seems like they "spawn" out of themselves...looks very strange. (I mean look at the third picture! Frontier should do something about it!)
The second picture is the "uglier" more compact zoo that also fits 5000 people now and they don't "overlap" as much!

Not really sure how to deal with it, personally I feel there's far too many guests in zoos and no real way to remove them. I think they should be condensed in some way - maybe make each group spend more while lowering total amount of groups. Or just let us set a guest limit - I think someone said you can do that in planet coaster?

I often feel I spend far too much time focused on my guests needs & barely any time keeping the animals happy; in a game thats meant to be about conservational awareness that seems backwards. Setting up an enclosure to keep an animal happy is easy. Finding a zoo layout that keeps the guests completely satisfied? Well that's just a nightmare, as they're just so needy.

In ZT2 I would just price my tickets at £100 when I wanted to lower the number of guests, but in this game that mainly seems to just annoy them. Does it lower the number of people entering the zoo? I'm scared to check considering the guest donations are basically required to keep a zoo from going under due to silly animal food prices. I guess I could store my animals in a smaller zoo and just run on exhibits for a year with £100 tickets (just to see what chaos ensues). It's sitting over a million $ so they can't bankrupt it in a year at least; they'll probably just spend a year vandalising everything.

ZT also a filter to hide the guests so I didn't have to look at them - this really needs to be an option in here, as the crazy large numbers of guests interacting with the zoo, especially when combined with bad weather seems to tank performance for a lot of people.

...

Edit: Seems if you set the tickets high most people will just leave without entering. And you need to set it really high as well - I've still got the overpriced complaint warning and I'm back up to 1500 guests that I was getting when the tickets were good value - they're just annoyed at the ticket price. The entry price guest control method doesn't seem viable.

Such a shame as the zoo looks perfect with smaller amounts of guests - it actually looks like an actual real-life zoo instead of some peak hours disneyland/theme park.

I really wish they'd reconsider the amount of guests needed to make a zoo sustainable. 😕
 
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I can confirm guest limit is an option on Planet Coaster. Here, I found a picture:
150895


It’s under park capacity.

It’s a very cool option, not only can you set a limit, but the number is completely customizable. Planet Zoo will greatly benefit from it, not just for performance reasons, but because the actual guest density (borrowed from Planet Coaster) was realistic in an amusement park, but in a zoo...not so much.

Edit: Image seems to be very blurry...but I can’t find another one, nor I can play the game now. Basically there’s a category called “Park Capacity”, in which you can check an option reading “Maximum guests”. If selected, then you can choose any number on a tab.
 
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It’s a very cool option, not only can you set a limit, but the number is completely customizable. Planet Zoo will greatly benefit from it, not just for performance reasons, but because the actual guest density (borrowed from Planet Coaster) was realistic in an amusement park, but in a zoo...not really.

Yeah. I think the copy paste from coaster doesn't sit well in a zoo franchise Vs a theme park. Too many guests just looks unrealistic.
Zoos are not usually so...overpopulated (maybe occasionally at peak times over the summer holiday). They can be almost empty during the the colder months here in the UK.

I'm not sure limiting guests will fix the underlying problem, as my zoos sadly need the huge amounts of tickets sold/donations to keep up with the crazy costs of animal food. I suspect they would need to rebalance some of the running costs before I could even consider limiting my guests.
 
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Hey there,
I registered extra for answering this question because I was very frustrated myself and my boyfriend found out by searching a look on the internet.
The first thing you guys already mentioned is right - overlapping speakers are a big problem and the refunds will go down if you fix that.
Second thing I tried out (and it worked) is reducing pickpocketing. If people get pickpocketed (as that right haha?) they will want a refund. I put 10 extra safety guards into my zoo and it helped A LOT! Next thing is to put up cameras. Vandalism is also bad and can also be prevented by those two.

The thing is I can assure you this helps because I never had overlapping speakers, so there was nothing to fix for me. But putting more security guards in my zoo paid off easy and the money they get was easy compensated by paying a lot less refunds.

Great advice and thank you for adding potential solutions to the issue!
 
I'm having this same issue and it's making me not want to play my franchise in case I go bankrupt!! I went from having about £300k in cash and making more every year to £70k in a few years and constantly losing money. I couldn't work out what was happening and soon realised it was refunds. But the game doesn't give much info as to what refunds are or why they are happening so I had to google and it led me here. I had no overlapping speakers. I've just moved around staff areas so they're well out of the way. More bins and caretakers. I've fired a lot of staff to try and save money on wages but now I fear that the animals or shops will suffer which in turn will make my guests unhappy! I really wish that there was some kind of pop-up warning about many guests requesting refunds because now I fear it may be too late for my 50 year old zoo :cry:
 
Refunds were a pain in Planet Coaster at times. It does seemed to linked with low welfare or you are Zoo version of a puppy farmer. I like the idea of Community Challenges/Franchise , but it needs a rethink in it's current form especially with breeding and game speeds.
Well my community challenge puppy farms get 0 refunds per year :p
 
If I could dive into the game, this would be how I deal with this:

Patron: I hate this place, I want a refund!

Me: Oh I'm sorry to hear that. May I ask what happened during your visit today that made you feel this way?

Patron: It was very noisy. It totally ruined all the exhibits I visited and the rides I went on and the food I ate. I want all my money back!

Me: Thank you for addressing this with me now, I wish you would have told our staff this during your visit - we always want to make sure our guests are enjoying their day at our zoo. We will absolutely address what you've brought to our attention but sadly as you've already made use of our facilities and left our park we can't offer you a refund. Please accept this voucher for free entry for your next visit. Thanks - you have a nice day now.

Patron: I'm not leaving until-

Me: Sssshhhhh, just go...

:rolleyes:



😅
 
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