Ask the Experts / How to boost a ride's satisfaction?

How to do it? I've got a perfectly themed and supported coaster in Piano Park, yet few people seem to come out happy. In fact, they are less happy after they've ridden it. It only has a satisfaction of about 30-40% max and normal ratings.

It does bother me, I want them to enter happy and the queue to be full. Any help and/or tips?

To be honest, I never really understood what satisfaction in RCT really means...

How long is the queue time?

Nobody actually waiting in line, everyone able to walk straight to the station. I'm more bothered with the peeps disembarking less happy then when they stepped on.

Could this be an OpenRCT2 thing, or are you building in the original?

I'm working in Open.

I'd just hack the stats

I fixed it. I saved the ride's design, scrapped it, enabled clearancy checks, and just put it back as a brand-new ride. This is the consequence:

Guest satisfaction has literally nothing to do with a ride's popularity or queue length.

When it comes to NE and RCT there's just about nothing I'd call myself an expert on, but I do consider myself to be NE's resident expert on insufferably long queue lines.

Very few rides can get long queue lines just by existing, there are a few ways this will happen though...

1) The ride is new (this is entirely useless because it's only a temporary solution, renewing all rides levels the playing field and takes away this advantage also)

2) The ride has the best excitement rating of any coaster in the park

3) The ride has miserable capacity

4) (This is unproven but I swear it's true) The ride is the tallest / fastest coaster in the park and has a reasonably high excitement rating.

If the ride doesn't fall into any of these categories but you want a long line, the path system is the most important factor, even more important than how good the ride is. Trust me.

The ultimate goal is simple, force people to be walking straight towards the entrance. Queue entrances perpendicular to a straight path don't get much attention, try putting the queue entrance at a path corner and you won't believe how much more popular the ride suddenly becomes, sometimes just by moving it one square. Since we all use path blocks you can put the ride entrance at a corner and not even make it look like a corner. If you have a double wide path blocks, make the actual path single wide and have it bend over 1 square right at a ride entrance. It works like a charm and nobody will realize you did it.

Finally, have the exit feed the entrance. Make it so that the exit path comes out, doesn't encounter any other paths and sends guests walking straight into the entrance again. Obviously if they don't want to ride again they can turn left or right but about half of them will. Make the exit path sort of long so that the end of the queue isn't still blocked even though further up the line is moving because they just loaded the train those peeps got off of. Also it spreads people out because if 2 people get to the queue entrance at the exact same time only one can enter.

None of these things address the actual popularity stat, but honestly who cares about that? If you want full queue lines though, this is how you do it. Open up Sunset Vista and look at the paths to see what I'm talking about (the real paths, not the path blocks). Especially look at the mine train, I barely give the little fuckers a choice. lol

To be honest, I never really understood what satisfaction in RCT really means...

Guest satisfaction has literally nothing to do with a ride's popularity or queue length.

 
We don't need to speculate about these things now that we have OpenRCT2, you can just read the source. So here are the factors affecting guest satisfaction:

• The price of the ride (unless the park is set to no_money). A price exceeding a set threshold results in reduced satisfaction.
• The intensity and nausea ratings. Each peep has their own preference; values outside that range result in reduced satisfaction.
• The queue length. A short queue results in increased satisfaction, a long queue will result in a reduction. Queue line TVs don't seem to have an effect here.
• There is an increase to satisfaction if a peep has previously ridden the ride and a further increase if they have previously ridden another ride of the same type.
• The peep's happiness upon leaving the ride also contributes.

Relevant code includes ride_update_satisfaction, peep_calculate_ride_satisfaction, peep_calculate_ride_value_satisfaction, and peep_calculate_ride_intensity_nausea_satisfaction.

What I meant by

Guest satisfaction has literally nothing to do with a ride's popularity or queue length.

is that the actual popularity / queue length of the ride isn't dictated by it's satisfaction score. Not the other way around. Those things may dictate the satisfaction score but I don't care about the satisfaction score because it's meaningless. When I use the terms popularity and queue length I don't mean that in any technical way, I'm just referring to how many people choose to get in line for it.