[Tutorial] Pricing on Rides + What makes a good ride?

[Valdo82]

Hello,

i sometimes see posts about ride pricing and some posts doesn't seem to notice how much the pricing and so on has changed. Of course we had the queue bug, but now that people actually go on rides, we can share more insights. So far, so good. If you have other observations feel free to share them here, but please keep it civil and i would appreciate it, if you would keep your opinion if you like or dislike the features to minimum, i have serveral threads about pricing feedback in the feedback forum, but this should be more of a tutorial for the community than a 'pricing discussion' thread.

The basics

The first major change is that guests seem to have infinite money now, while in previous iteration of the series guests always had a randomly assigned amount of money, that some how determined how much guests were willing to spent on a ride this system is now gone.

Every single ride has now a bargain price. This is the amount every guest is willing to spend on the ride. The game calculates the bargain price on various factors, some are intuitive, some not so much, but i will come to that later. Right now if a guests want to queue for a ride and it is on bargain price, they will queue on that ride.

Let's take a look on the pricing options:

Under Ticket we can see via drop down our Options: Bargain, Premium, Dynamic and Custom

Bargain: Explained above, it sets the ride to the actual Bargain price.
Premium: Seems to set the base price +25%ish. I see variants of 20-30 but mostly it was 25%

Dynamic: Here you can let the game automatically adjust the price depending on the queuelength: Standards are 2 mins to 120 mins and bargain to premium. in my example i adjusted the queue to 5 Mins to 20 mins, as long as the queue is not longer than 5 mins wait, guests will pay the actual bargain price from the time i clicked to dynamic (if you wonder about the strange wording, you will get it later), if there is a wait of 20 min or more, guests will have to pay 13,18 (premium), so if there was a 10 minute line guest would pay around 11,39. so the price is dynamically adjusted.

Keep in mind that queuetime is not live, but refreshes around every ride cycle. The current price even has a bit more delay to it.

Depending on the ride time, the queuetime may change significantly.

Custom: Here you can enter any price you want, this doesn't mean the guests will pay it.


Aaaah to much theory what price should i pick?

I feel bargain and dynamic has the strongest case for them, but premium could also be good, it depends a bit of the situation: Bargain is the take it and don't care option: Your price will always the actual minimum price. This has the result, that you probably earn less money, than you would, but your queues are nicely packed, but be aware, they may be too packed and create an ugly overflow, a ball of people queue for a ride.
Premium: You earn more money and limit the queue a lot. Guests will complain about the prices.
Dynamic: in Theory the one price to rule them all: you control the queue from overflowing to some extent and earn money, most guests will not complain about the prices, but of course you always have the cheapskates that only want to pay a price close to the bargain price. Here we got right now two issues, i didn't mention so far: the bargain price is not fixed, but dynamic, so you need to check in once in a while and switch the ride to bargain and see if the price has changed or at least eyetests the queue if it is overflown or empty (and your guests are not leaving right now) and there is a bug, which may break your immersion, i come to that in a minute.

As a rule of thumb: I let my rides on bargain for a few ride cycles, (5-15, but i watch how much if at all the bargain price jumps), then i switch to dynamic mostly after the ride has a nice big queue, which i kill with the bugs below....

When do guests pay

In PC 1 guests used to pay a the entrance of the queue, this has changed back more compared to the old RCT model. Guest seem to pay as soon as the ride is 'locked' in all gates are filled and the next coaster could be loaded. Or a flat ride is loaded and ready to take off. I can't say the exact time, but the important change is: Guests pay at the ride not at the beginning of the queue anymore.


Known bugs as of Hotfix 2

My guests in the queue got deleted and a teleported to the entrance

Yeah, most of the times if you significantly may a ride more expensive, some/many guests are not willing to price anymore, but instead turning around in the queue or spawning at the ride exit, they will spawn at the park entrance. If you change a full queue from bargain to dynamic you will see the queue almost empty and a lot of guests right at the entrance and this is the issue with dynamic: if you let all your rides run on dynamic you will constantly have guests spawning at the entrance. Not much per ride, maybe just one or two every 3 cycles, but it accumulates over time, so if you have rides with a really long cycle, for example the obeservation tower, you may see more guests at the entrance since the price has changed a lot between two cycles.

The bargain price is 0

'all my guests saying the ride is too expensive, nobody is riding it, unless i set the price to zero' Yeah, it is standard on go karts (everytime i build them which was 8) and can occur sometimes on other rides too. Yes, they game doesn't seem to able to calculate the bargain price, cause it lacks some data. Here is the trick simple: Let the ride cycle for 1-2 cycles and the bargain price is set, after that the guests will pay money for it.

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The Bargain price and how it is calculated

While the first part of pricing was relatively easy, welcome to weirdoland. I don't get the grasp fully (here to many hidden numbers to complete reverse engineer it and i don't feel that it is my job, to run a math/tech lab unpaid for this game), but here are some weird unrealistic things going on:

The Bargain price is calulated: Prestige x Capacity of the Ride

As rough formula, let me explain, the higher the prestige of a ride, the more a guests are willing to pay, makes a lot of sense and is easy. The second part is the complicated one: the less people a ride can put through per [time] the higher the Bargain price will be. Makes a bit of sense: slingshots, skydive, etc. are often an upcharge in parks cause they have notorious low capacity.

But PC2 cranked this up to 11 and then doubled down on the idea, let me give you an example:

Here we have our two contestants: both standing proud at around 200 prestige. I actually forgot the real number but they were within 10 prestige.

Our Tiny Eye comes in at 16 guests max. (4 gondolas a 4 persons), due to a bug 2 gondolas aren't used.

proudly we have $8,23 as an bargain price.

Our Teacups with 60 guests, get a bargain price of 2,37$

So yes people are willing to pay roughly 4x as much for the tiny eye than the teacups.
You all see that projected income is within 500$ for the day? Yes PC2 is trying to flatten out the ride prices roughly at a Prestige/Day basis.

So if you ever wondered why people are paying 5$ for your 4 Train operated, line eating giga coaster, but are willing to pay 40$ on your monsoon chute, there is your answer.

But at least we can smooth out operation, add another train and so on to get our coaster make more money than our tiny eye! But do we really?

My Big M LSM Coaster running a one train operation on a slow day:

Mh, the queue line is getting and 20$ per head, lets commit to it and get the second train out:

Same ride, i didnt do anything to the layout, i just switched from two trains (screenshot below) to one train (the upper screenshot)

You think this was crazy?

Let me give you another scenario.

Let's we run two trains, now one of our ride ops is taking a break and the next ride attendant is at the other of the park, cause i could not care less about staffmanagment and just hired enough ride ops. Of course, there is one packed train on the breaks, which has actually a real long cycle time.

Yes, this happened.

I also noticed some bumps in the price if a mechanic is servicing the ride and so on.

Learnings so far (TL;DR)

Every ride has base price called as bargain price, which is the price every guest would pay for the ride. This is dynamically set by the game, while prestige is still a big factor, the ride baseprice is determined a lot by the capacity of the ride. The game tries to flatten out that every ride should make roughly the same money over a day. Micromanagment of a ride is not really needed, you can not really fail or win at pushing the bargain price. Taking the option for dynamic pricing into account, you should aim for long loading times and coasters should probably run as few trains as possible, if you really want to min max your earnings.

[i will edit-add a chapter about prestige later, cause the capacity thing is not the only that is counterintuitve and complicated]

 

[Nemmie]

There's some great insights there. Thanks for taking the effort to get all this together.

 

[Valdo82]

Ok, here I am with more and this time juicy results, that actually suprised me

On the last lesson we learned the impact of capacity, because I still feel that is the most impact, when it comes to pricing, but now let us take a look at Prestige.

What is Prestige?

"Prestige is the appeal and value of an attraction to guests. Guests will pay more for attractions with a higher Prestige" - This is what planet coaster 2 tells us. So more or less it is how "good" a ride is trimmed down to one number.
Prestige is calculated by Ride Experience + Theming. Theming seems to be capped at 500 aka 10000 Scenery Score, while Ride Experience seems to have no cap. The overall cap is 1000.
This makes a lot of sense. If i tend to compare two real life coaster: Taron (Phantasialand) vs. Untamed (Walibi Holland). Both are 5 Stars coasters, but pure ride experience: Which ride is more exciting i would go with Untamed (and subjectively it is not even close), so why do i see both as a 5 Star ride, while untamed has decent theming, Taron is a whole diffrent beast in that department. So theming can make a good coaster great.

But how are both numbers made?

Ride Experience Part I

This was my Test Track. A simple Gerstlauer Eurofighter. We have a LSM Launch (with 5s holding) up to 56 kph, a curve, two block breaks and a second launch to 40 kph, with an unbanked curve, another block section. With 4 Cars the experience was 240, with one car it was 245.

With one train: we peaked on 47.99s ride time, 3,81 Excitement and 3,18 Fear (0,98 Nausea). (6,99 E+F) // (7,97 EFN)

With 4 Trains we came to: 99,82s 3,14 E, 2,63 F and 0,8 N ( 5,77 E+F // 6,57 EFN)

So we literally doubled our ride time through all stops on the block section and lost around 1,2 E+F. But it just costed us 4 Ride rating or a diffrence on the whole scale of 0,4%points.

So first at least on per ride layout / basis the impact of EFN doesn't seem that much anymore. Of course there are guest tolerances and so on, but all combined. "The ugh, the coaster sits on the break for 2s" - Fear i had, doesn't impact the ride (or just marginally).
A diffrence to PC1 is also even if the ride time changes (4 trains, diffrence between 99s and 105s) the EFN stayed the same.

Last conclusion i had: My ride attendant was taking a break, instead of hiring a new one, i just wanted to know if something happens, when guests sit one ingame hour on the break one. No change at all, the experience stayed at 240.

I will need future tests on the experience, but here i also want to see diffrent layouts.

So again as summary: The combined E+F rating doesn't seem to have the single impact, I believed it had, but future testing is needed, cause i never changed the layout much. There is one part for the ride experience, which is in the scenery section, which didn't affect the EFN much, you will read below



Scenery and Queue

So we got the brush tool, getting scenery up is not that hard:

I surrounded the ride and queue with some trees. actually a lot. Do you notice the increase in ride experience? EFN stayed the same (i believe there was a 0.02 changed in E, but i forgot to took a sceenshot.) So we see Scenery impacts the ride double. The ride experience goes up and way more signaficantly than any block section changes 23 points vs. 4 Points, but our whole ride got a lot more prestige.

Ok, i roughly halved the scenery, i was actually curious, if the impact was just the station or the whole track, but it mostly got the expected result: Half the scenery, half the scenery bonus. Though Ride Experience lost more (counting from 240 base ride), but here we need more sample size. So far the takeaway is the Scenery impact is the whole ride and not just the station and queue.

Ok, let's try how scenery affects the ride if it is 'interacting' with the ride:

So now we got some headchoppers, the animation and sound are played, so it is interacting. Oh our ride experience is back Here, i actually didn't check EFN anymore. The Scenary rating also got up again, and yes walls have more scenery score than trees, so the number seems ok to me.

(the next screen is less important, but since we are dealing with numbers here, i need it so you know why the numbers changed).

I copied the grid pieces over the station/queue and just roughly the same amount away from the queue, i was still testing, if the impact was just from the queue point or from the ride point. (it is the ride). But a small spoiler: Mathfreaks will notice, that i got less scenery rating for the pieces over the queue/Station than the first placement. (2814 vs. 2246). [the change in ride xp i switched from 1 to 4]

Ok, now i got the question: How far is scenery accounted for, since i this were grid pieces, i moved them 4m, 8m, ... m to the right.

24m was the last step before i didn't notice any change. There are diminishing returns, so the further away the scenery the less scenery bonus a ride gets up to roughly 20-25m.

I promised juicy, didn't I? Then let's go: I deleted all pieces on the track side. and got to 4144-4137 scenery rating*, now i extended my queue a bit away from the Station, to the other side where i prevoius copied our headchoppers and place some nice blue prints to decorate our queue:

Tada, the same scenery rating.I tested it, i moved the buildings. So queue decoration is a myth, the bonus for queue you get, is actually the scenery bonus for the ride. Actually the game doesn't say queue theming anymore, so this is a magnificient change from PC1.

*about scenery rating: This is weird, the game calculates for every cycle (live) and the results may vary, this can be rounding or anything. so i recommend: if you want to have the scenery rating of a ride: wait a lot of cycles with guests, cause this number takes it time to produce median results.

Summary [TL;DR]: Prestige is affected from Ride Experience and Scenery Bonus. The ride experience doesn't seem to take that much efn into account than we thought, on the same ride a diffrence from 1.2 E+F doesn't have a major impact.
Scenery rating seems to have moved from queue scenery to actual ride scenery, if your queue is to far from the ride, you don't get any bonus. If the scenery interacts with the riders (headchopper animation and sound is played) you get also a small bonus to ride experience. The further away the scenery is placed from a ride the less scenery bonus you get.

(to do: - ride experience requires more testing, the actual impact of prestige on the bargain price (i totally forgot to check the prices), actual 'car theming')

 

[McClintock]

Thank you so much for these insights and your efforts. This is very helpful!

 

[benmrowe]

This is a great explanation of the mechanics behind one of my least favourite things about the game. The starkest example is the ride income dramatically dropping when a second train is added to a coaster. If a ride with one train is really popular and people will pay proper money for it, adding a second train and increasing capacity may have a minor impact on pricing in reality - but in the game the income more than halves. Desperately still needs to be looked at as the prestige per hour calculation to flatten income just isn't fun or realistic.