Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Cafe World Tips 23: Low Buzz Rating Revisited

Low buzz rating.

Hiya chefs, I am doing some updating on my experiences with Café World, what makes it tick and how to make it play as well as your computer can.

Low buzz rating is almost invariably a problem with doors; blocked passage ways; poorly set up café (tables are thrown all over the place making it take a long time for servers to get food to the tables) and the lack of using teleporting.

In fact, if you AREN’T using teleporting – where waiters are trapped behind the counters and “throw” the dishes to the waiting customers, I STRONGLY suggest you set up your café to do so, especially if you have consistent low-buzz-rating problems.  When you have your waiters teleporting the food, you can set up your café just about anyway you please and you will still have a high buzz rating.

90% of the time that I have inspected a person’s café to try and help them fix their problem, the problem lied in the fact that they thought they had the waiters teleporting when, indeed, they were not.  When I reported back to them that their waiters are wandering around the restaurant, they were surprised at such and reported back that yes, you were right, they aren’t blocked!!

The point is that you have to make sure they are sufficiently blocked but at the same time that they have access from inside the blocked area to ALL counters with food on them.  THAT is where most people get it wrong.  People think that they can block in their waiters and at the same time have their counters set up any which way.  Simply not true. 
If you waiters do not have access to all counters from inside the blocked area, then they will simply walk right through the counters and deliver the food to the waiting customer.

Make sure, from INSIDE the blocked area, that you have nothing on the floor that will stop the waiter from accessing EVERY counter.  Make sure you haven’t got counters in front of counters, this is usually the problem and simply rearranging the counters usually fixes the problem.  Once you actually have your waiters teleporting the food, sit back and enjoy the fact that your buzz rating is going back up and will stay up there.  Occasionally you might find it go down for a few seconds upon entering your café, but it always should go right back up and stay there. 

Also, always make sure that when you leave your café, the buzz rating is at 105.  The buzz rating will NOT go down once you are out of your café and will stay there for however long until you return to your café to take care of your customers and waiting dishes. 

If, for some reason, you do not want to have your waiters teleporting, then you must closely inspect your café if you are having buzz issues.  The customers do NOT want to wait forever for a waiter to bring the food to them. If they have a long way to go, or there are obstacles in the way making them go far around to get to them, or there are blockages making serving them impossible, they will leave with thumbs down and buzz goes down, too.

Each table much have at least 1 access point for the waiter to be able to put the food on the table.  One of the biggest problems I have encountered is that many people put their counters up against a wall, far away from the tables.  This works fine with teleporting, but if you don’t want to teleport, probably not so fine.  A more effective setup has your counters in the middle of your café so that waiters don’t have far to walk to get food from counter to table. 

There is another issue I must address here that I have spoken about before as well:  Your computer.  I recently built a new computer.  It has 8 gigs of RAM; an AMD Athlon II X4 640 Processor; and a medium quality ASUS motherboard, fitted with a 1 Terabyte hard drive and a 750 watt power supply.  My OLD computer IS old. It was built by Dell.  It has an Intel 4 processor, no clue what the motherboard is and 2 gigs of ram.  THAT computer had GREAT difficult running Cafe World.  I would enter my Cafe and buzz rating would drop and drop and drop.  If I let it sit there for a couple of hours without doing anything, the buzz rating would eventually come back up.

Yes, that's my point.  It isn't ALWAYS Zynga's fault.  Your computer might be a dinosaur that needs replacing.  There isn't much fun about an internet experience that is slow, gives you lots of error messages and causes Explorer to shut down.  I know, we are in bad economic times.  Maybe buying a new computer or building one yourself isn't in the cards.  But, if by chance, it is and your computer is old, you might consider it.  My entire internet experience greatly improved, not just with Cafe World, but - I have to say that Cafe World loads almost instantly now.  It used to take up to 15 minutes to load it.  I click on something and it's either there or a second passage and it's there.  For as much time as I spend on the computer and internet, the money spent was WELL worth it.

More to come in the future.  

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