What can I do about long queue times?

Guests keep complaining that various rides have long queue times. How can I improve this? I've tried making the ride more expensive, but that hasn't deterred people. What can I do to rectify this?

Solution 1:

The easy solution is to make the queue shorter. People won't queue then and look for other things to spend their money on. Ideally a queue should just be long enough to buffer one full load, plus a few extra meters to compensate for irregular inflow of guests. And besides, shorter queues also have the advantage that it is easier to get a 100% queue scenery rating.

But that only fixes the symptom and still generates "queue is full" negative thoughts. The root cause of the problem is often that the ride isn't as efficient as it could be. When you can optimize the ride to have a higher throughput, you can prevent bad thoughts from waiting too long and make it far more profitable.

• Non-tracked rides often have a program of animations which you can customize on the "Sequence" tab. The default programs can be quite long for some rides. When you remove some of the animations, the ride will be a bit less exciting, but will be over quicker.

• With rollercoasters you can double the throughput by using two trains. You can do that by:

  1. adding a block break section at the end of the track
  2. go to the "Operations" tab
  3. set the ride to "Block Section"
  4. change the number of trains to two.

  You can add even more block breaks or use multiple lift hills to allow even more trains, but that usually requires some more planning and is usually only worth it for extremely long coasters.

• With tracked rides which allow an arbitrary number of cars without requiring block sections, take some time to optimize the number of cars on the "Operations" tab to make sure there is always one available in the station for people to board (but not so many that there is a queue of cars to unload). You need to do that with real people and not in testing mode, because testing mode doesn't simulate the time it takes for guests to board and unboard the cars.
• All rides allow to optimize the minimum and maximum waiting time on the "Operations" tab. Do this to prevent the ride from either starting before being completely filled or from staying idle even though it is filled. The default values are wrong for some rides. The teacup ride, for example, will only be filled to two-thirds when running with the default maximum waiting time.