Think I Found The Root To The "Refund Issue": Trading And Release To Wild

[AaronTuckwell]

So.. I did a little research and some digging..

It appears that a lot of the "didn't see animal" unhappy refunds are linked to you either trading out or releasing to the wild while the guest is in the zoo and has a desire to see a specific animal. It seems that the desire is linked to seeing a specific animal rather than just being happy to see a giraffe for example. But, if for some reason the animal is not available: quarantine, vet, traded out, released to wild etc; the guest gets annoyed with this and demands a refund.

So, to test this, I had another profitable zoo, making 55k a year profit. I did loads of admin to released a tonne of Tortoises, Lemurs, a couple of aardvarks and about 100 flamingos (apparently animal welfare in my zoo suffers when I build, I'm a bad person, I know). Any-way, the next year? loss of 60k. Following year? Loss of 30k. Year after (essentially when all of the disappointed guests have been replaced)? Back to 50k profit again. In this time, the refunds spiked from around 200 a month right up to 70k and then went down over the following 2 years.

So, this brings me back to my original point: It is badly coded and balanced. The desire to see an animal shouldn't be attached to a specific one, but to a habitat; OR the guest should be aware that the animal has been released from the zoo (maybe even building in some sort of mechanic that release to the wild makes them happy and trading annoys them a little; but not demand a refund). The very fact that your population booms massively and needs "admin" is sort of fixed with the slider, but it is a bandaid at best.

 

[marcnesiumHH]

It's good that more people do testing for this issue. But are you sure that it was really the (reduced) annoyance of not seeing a specific animal and not the reduction of loss due to less feeding costs and a better result due to better animal welfare?
It would have been helpful to see the detailed heat maps and economic figures to nail that one down.

 

[AaronTuckwell]

Well, I've been able to reproduce this on demand to varying degrees of affect. Every time I transfer animals out, there is a spike in refunds: The more I transfer, the higher the spike. It seems that while the refunds account for a good portion of the "loss" the other part comes from a rapid drop in income too; presumably from donations - in part because guests decide to go home rather than stay and in part because they don't donate to missing animals.

There are also other factors too; of course there are: Education, shop demand, habitat & path tax etc. But for the most part, it seems that most of the struggles with larger, animal-over-run zoos comes from trading them out and the drastic drop in income that comes from it.

THIS is about as good as I can get for "analysis" right now. Every time there is a drop in profit, there has been mass transferring of animals. There isn't a line on the graph for "donations", "animals transferred" or "income" in general... But this helps paint the picture.

NOTE: In the "profit" line, I've managed to just about balance what animals I CAN transfer while making a profit. I dare not do another mass transfer; I'm too scared I'll lose my zoo again!

 

[marcnesiumHH]

THIS is about as good as I can get for "analysis" right now.

Thanks for sharing. That the game has a strong positive correlation of number of animals and income, that I had already found out in Beta.
I managed to bring my refunds in an acceptable range (4k which is 1% of total expenses). I will try to reproduce your findings regarding an influence on refunds.

 

[NL_Mutso]

Agreed, it shouldn't matter much if you release an animal and have enough animals of that type in the same habitat.

But there's a logic to this, some people actually visit the zoo for their favorite animal and could be very annoyed/angry when that specific animal is released. They don't care much about the other animals in that habitat, just that 1. Refunds still doesn't make sense.

I think OP's conclusion only applies to habitat animals, didn't see this happening with exhibit animals yet.. I only have 1 per exhibit, some die very fast and the exhibit is empty for a while.
and no refunds.

We do have an individual rating per animal..
Refunds for a popular animal doesn't make much sense, lower donations do.. (imo)

 

[marcnesiumHH]

a positive correlation with the attractiveness rating of an animal and the amount of donations makes sense (at least is it consistent with the ingame mechanism) but I see no sense in a correlation with the amount. If the guest is able to visit/ see an animal / or his favourite animal, this should be enough.