RCT2 Fleecer - a web app to calculate the maximum price that guests will pay for rides

[invalio]

Hey all, I'd like to introduce you to RCT2 Fleecer. It's a small web app I've built to help manage the ride ticket prices in pay-per-ride scenarios. Given a ride's type and ratings, it will calculate the maximum price that guests will pay for that ride. Build up a list of rides and see at a glance how much the rides in your park are worth!

I consider it an iteration on Shottysteve's useful RCT2 Ride Price Calculator. It's an early build without any public testing, but serves as a decent proof of concept and is helpful enough that I've been using it while I play recently. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

https://invalio19.github.io/rct2-fleecer/

Bugs and feature requests can be raised here. There are a number of planned/potential features here already so do check that your request isn't already on the list!

Features:

• Build up a list of rides and get the maximum price you can charge for them—or the 'good value' price—based on its ratings.
• Automatic duplicate ride type detection (having more than one ride of the same type decreases its value by about 25%).
• Data is auto-saved to the browser whenever any details are changed, and persists even when the page is closed.
• Compatible with RCT2, RCT Classic and OpenRCT2.
• Manually sort the order of rides.
• Designed to work well on mobile.

[IceKnight366]

That's cool man thanks!  I'm more of a entry fee guy myself.  As I understand it the entry fee that guests are willing to pay is based on the park value found in the finance tab.  Nevertheless, it's very difficult to figure out how much they're willing to pay, especially since RCT2 got rid of the, "Your price is too high, consider lowering it" warning that RCT1 gave.  Any chance a entry fee calculator might be in the pipe?

[invalio]

5 hours ago, IceKnight366 said:

That's cool man thanks!  I'm more of a entry fee guy myself.  As I understand it the entry fee that guests are willing to pay is based on the park value found in the finance tab.  Nevertheless, it's very difficult to figure out how much they're willing to pay, especially since RCT2 got rid of the, "Your price is too high, consider lowering it" warning that RCT1 gave.  Any chance a entry fee calculator might be in the pipe?

Sure, it's on the cards. I believe the park entry price is based on a total of your ride values, so hopefully it'll be a very similar calculation, but there might be a few modifiers somewhere that I don't know about. I'll have to look into it as it isn't discussed as often, but it is definitely in the pipeline.

[IceKnight366]

1 hour ago, invalio said:

Sure, it's on the cards. I believe the park entry price is based on a total of your ride values, so hopefully it'll be a very similar calculation, but there might be a few modifiers somewhere that I don't know about. I'll have to look into it as it isn't discussed as often, but it is definitely in the pipeline.

That's great to hear!  Yeah, it might be something like that, I think you're right.  As I remember it, it seemed to me that having stalls, or basically anything a customer uses, also gets added into the park value.  I believe your park value also goes down with the more red-lettered warnings you get (like your part is too dirty, or too much vandalism, etc...) which might entail, reversely, that the cleaner your park, the faster you repair rides, the less vandalism, etc...., in your park the higher the rating, and thus the more people will be willing to pay.  I've always wondered it receiving awards increased your park value.  I don't think it ever did, but that would be something cool to add into the game so that a "reward" is actually that, it isn't just some meaningless trophy you automatically win at the end of the year or something.

I've always found the park entree fee-style of play to be more fun and realistic (at least for large parks).  Unfortunately, it's somewhat unbalanced, if not broken, for mid-late-game play.  I've talked about it before, but it wasn't received very well by some in the community (perhaps that was my fault for coming off as harsh).  You don't have to read the giant post, but if you're interested I'll post it here anyway and I'd like to hear what you think.  Anyway, thanks again man!
 

 

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When you get to the late game where you have a park that covers up to half (or even all) of the entire largest custom map, you hit that 200 max staff mark REALLY easy - like really really easy. I have spent hours and hours testing this. In my large parks I've had my staff spaced out as much as I could possibly could and had them on their max patrols. That is, if I had them patrol larger areas than they were patrolling, you would have started to see vandalizing, rides being broken for too long, and litter covering the streets. In addition, I have zero entertainers because they just aren't as important even though it would have been nice to have them. I even just completely took out benches, lamps and trash cans in some areas so as not to need security guards in certain areas so that I could have more handymen and mechanics. Trust me, I'VE TRIED EVERYTHING. I can send screen shots too if you need the proof.

The main problem was always the cost of staff. With a maximum of 200 staff (all of which you need on a big park, and even more so! In fact, large parks need a minimum of 300-400+ staff to keep it running optimally. The only way you could do it on the vanilla RCT2 is to have the "fast staff" cheat that allows you to cover 2x-3x as much ground allowing you so spread your staff out more and cover more area) at an average of $65+ per staff, that's $13,000! There's no way you can make that money up at tiny park entrance fee of 100-200 - it's not going to happen. Especially when you reached the sprite limit - meaning you need to have one guest leave before anther one could come in. This decreases your park entrance fee amounts. It's poorly balanced.  My largest park has a park entrance fee of $650 and a park value of $1,330,000.00.  As such, guests pay the price of $650 and I'm barely breaking even.  At $200 per entrance fee you would REGULARLY need 70+ guests to enter your park EVERY MONTH JUST TO BREAK EVEN.  Which means you're not even making a profit to continue to build.  And I don't know about you, but I don't think I've ever had even one month, even with advertisements, where 50 people entered my park in one month.  Average seems to be about 20-30, and once you hit the sprite limit, average is about 10-15.  Which means at $650, at most, you make less than $10,000 a month; $3000 less to break even.  Sure, you can include $3,000 in food and merchandise, but subtract $1,200+ for restocking and that puts you at $11,800.  Now subtract $2,500 for ride operating costs and your at $9,300.  Congratulations, you just lost $3,700 that month.  The financial aspect of this game is broken and these are necessary changes in order to fix it.  And yes, these are all real numbers.  I can provide screen shots for proof.

The fact is, the game gets to a point where it's broken because you can only raise the entry price so high (thus need to use cheats to raise it), the guests only carry so much money (thus need to use cheats to make them carry more), and you are limited in staff (thus have to use cheats to make fast staff). Combine this with the fact that you are limited in sprites and so when you reach max sprites you have guests coming into your park far lower rate.  The problem compounds even more when you reach max attractions as there are higher operating costs. I hope to be able to build more than 255 max attractions in open RCT2. But that means you need more mechanics which are the most expensive staff members, and you'll have higher operating costs. There are many facets to this.

My biggest hope for this game is being able to raise the sprite level. When you make large parks like me, 8000-8600 (max feasible guests in a park) guests in your park makes the park look almost empty. I always hoped to be able to go up to 20,000-30,000 max guests. But of course this means you need more than 200 staff. But if you have more than 200 staff it's going to charge MUCH MORE. Which means you'll need much more than a 200 limit. You'll need at least a $1,000 limit, and better to have $1,200-$1,500 to play it safe.

At least three reasonable solutions:
1) Inflate the value of the currency (in this case the dollar) to match current economic standards.  What does a coffee cost in RCT2?  $1.50?  A burger is $2.75?  Who in the world pays that much for food these days lol.  Even McDonalds isn't that cheap.  And at a theme park?  Psh... you're likely to pay $15+ for a burger and drink.  Change the game so that guests are willing to pay at least $8 for a burger and anything less than that would be too cheap.  You could quadruple your merchandise sales which would make up the difference.
2) Decrease the cost of hiring staff or make their wages bi-monthly.  I don't particularly like this option much, but it is there.
3) It's possible, although I'm not sure how likely, that simply increasing the sprites, and therefore guests, in your park will make up the difference in itself.  That is, if at $750,000 park rating I was at 10k guests, that increased revenue from concessions might make up the difference.  For example, if you're at a park value of $1,330,000.00 and can only have 8,600 guests in your park, that's only 8,600 guests buying food and drinks.  But when the new save format comes and the game limits are eliminated, you might have 20,000 guests in your park buying food and drinks.  That's a lot more revenue!  But I'm not sure it's possible to know with any certainty that this solution, by itself, will work.

[invalio]

I've made an update to the app so it now includes a recommended park entry fee, plus some information on the factors to consider around it. Hope you find it useful.

As for the park entrance fee gameplay issues you're facing, I can't really comment or offer any insight there. I tend not to ever build up to a mega park where this would be a problem.

[IceKnight366]

1 hour ago, invalio said:

I've made an update to the app so it now includes a recommended park entry fee, plus some information on the factors to consider around it. Hope you find it useful.

As for the park entrance fee gameplay issues you're facing, I can't really comment or offer any insight there. I tend not to ever build up to a mega park where this would be a problem.

Yeah I checked it out, that's nice information.  Are you sure there aren't more factors than that though?  Like like a trash, vandalism, or broken down rides, guests not dying, etc....  Also, I see you haven't actually added a recommended price entry fee, just the check box for one, is that right?  Because when I check the box nothing happens, just an option to click why and check out some of the factors that go into price entry fee.

[invalio]

20 hours ago, IceKnight366 said:

Yeah I checked it out, that's nice information.  Are you sure there aren't more factors than that though?  Like like a trash, vandalism, or broken down rides, guests not dying, etc....  Also, I see you haven't actually added a recommended price entry fee, just the check box for one, is that right?  Because when I check the box nothing happens, just an option to click why and check out some of the factors that go into price entry fee.

There is a recommended park entrance fee in the app. You'll need to check 'park has entrance fee' and add some rides with stats to see any meaningful value for it.

I looked at the OpenRCT2 codebase and did some in-game testing to confirm the calculations. Things like trash and vandalism don't look to have any effect on your park entrance fee value, which is strictly based on the value of your open rides. Trash and vandalism etc. will of course still negatively affect your park rating which I believe lowers guest generation, so it's still worth keeping the park rating high for maximum income.