reducing prices has no influence on price reputation (bug?)

[noodles]

I increased price to +20% to reduce the amount of patients. Once I reduced the long queues, I reset the prices in order to get more patients. The actual reputation value (blue bar on the bottom right) increased quickly, but the price reputation in the price bar is still showing nothing. Patient count did Not increase when I reduced price from +20% to 0%. Finally, even reducing prices all the way down to -80% has no influence on patient count.

[Jeruzalem]

I think number of patients isnt tied much to price, but more to reputation anyway. Setting the price high or low only seems to influence the willingness of patients to pay.

All in all, it doesnt seem hard to win in this game, while losing seems difficult. As long as you provide a hospital that looks nice, has toilets and enough food and drinks, patients dont seem to care about the rest.

In my game, i keep getting the popup that reducing prices will help hospital rep. I was playing with +10% prices during the whole scenario and my rep was full by the end of my second star.

[Sombrero]

Originally posted by Jeruzalem:

I think number of patients isnt tied much to price, but more to reputation anyway. Setting the price high or low only seems to influence the willingness of patients to pay.

All in all, it doesnt seem hard to win in this game, while losing seems difficult. As long as you provide a hospital that looks nice, has toilets and enough food and drinks, patients dont seem to care about the rest.

In my game, i keep getting the popup that reducing prices will help hospital rep. I was playing with +10% prices during the whole scenario and my rep was full by the end of my second star.

If you're in the first hospitals yes that is correct. But please stop saying a game is easy when you're still in the tutorial levels.

As for price I am personally pretty sure it has 0 impact on population it just causes your patient to be more or less happy everytime they have to pay based on price and the feature is very clunky if not buggy. It makes a while to have impact on people like for example you can go from +100 to - 100 and they will keep saying it is too expensive for a while. I tend to never tinker with the prices everytime i did I only got problems

[Alundra (Alunny)]

Pretty sure price has no impact on patient numbers. The best way to get rid of the queues though is to go to the patient list, align by diagnosis, and work your way down from pretty green all the way to the end and "send for treatment" anyone who can be sent.

Also 0 on the pricelist does not affect price rep unfortunately. -80% affects it no more than -10% also.

[uniflare]

+100% prices from the start every time, never fails.

[Fringehunter7719]

Prices at -10% or below makes price reputation increase by a point as patients pay for certain things, prices at 10% or above makes price reputation decrease by a point as patients pay for certain things. Thus if you set either favourable or unfavourable prices over time your reputation will head for 0 or 100.

My limited testing on prices seems only to show that if you have a good price rep, then people will refuse to pay for things if you try raising prices, whereas if you have a bad price rep, they seem to pay, which means there's zero benefit to setting low prices, at least as far as I can tell.

[Alundra (Alunny)]

Fringehunter I agree with your first paragraph but I went into debt from people refusing to pay because my rep was below 50%.

[Fringehunter7719]

Are you sure that's right? Because I've been running the last 5 hospitals with 0% prices rep and I've seen all of 2 people refuse to pay in all of them combined. Including about 20 minutes of prices +100% on literally everything.

If that prices rep is reducing the chance that people pay then something else I'm doing (and I can't think what that could be) is completely counteracting the effect.

[Alundra (Alunny)]

I've noticed there's an interesting array of bugs out there that seem to be hit or miss...maybe this is one of those? I had to restart the training hospital level because putting prices to 10% made me go to 0 price rep, putting them to zero didn't help at all I had to go -10% (once I realised to -80% did nothing more lol). Perhaps the method is different for each hospital level. I know for my next one I am going to try out Uniflare's idea :D.

[ScruffyBamboo]

In my last hospital, I saw a direct link between price and reputation (which in turn, affect the number of visitors).

I was trying to get the final achievement for my star (2M hospital value), and the number kept dropping. Turns out, it's very much tied to profitability - every month I was losing money, the hospital value would drop.

In the meantime, my other parameter for the star - reputation above 80% - was not a problem - rep was pegged at 99%.

Still, I had to do something, so I jacked up the prices (around 60%, I think). Great - started making money, and my hospital value was moving up about 100k per month... but my reputation had started sliding.

By the time I got the hospital value up over 2M, my reputation had dropped to 82% - barely enough to get the star. Still - the added bonus was that I got less visitors, which really helped with my queue times.

So IMHO, prices DO affect the number of visitors you get. But I'm still figuring this game out lol...

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by Alundra:

I've noticed there's an interesting array of bugs out there that seem to be hit or miss...maybe this is one of those? I had to restart the training hospital level because putting prices to 10% made me go to 0 price rep, putting them to zero didn't help at all I had to go -10% (once I realised to -80% did nothing more lol). Perhaps the method is different for each hospital level. I know for my next one I am going to try out Uniflare's idea :D.

The training hospital is one I have set to 100% increased prices, so it can't be down to something specific to that hospital. I can take some screenshots to show what I've done if that would help.

[Alundra (Alunny)]

That would rock! Are your staff trained up there?

[Skirlasvoud]

Reputation consists of four different factors in total:

Medical Reputation
Patient Happiness
Pricing
Staff Skill
Media Publicity


If your Medical, Patient, Staff and Media rating are near maximum, it doesn't matter how high you set your pricing. 20% is enough to tank the score already, but if the other four ratings are really high, they will still manage to drag your hospital up to "Great".

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503375477

This is why changing pricing only works for early hospitals, who are not as developed in the other 4 ratings. For a late game hospital, people will come regardless and you are expected to deal with it.

Usually, by the time my other four ratings get that high, my hospitals run well enough to be able to deal with any amount of patients, using 6 GP offices maximum.

If pricing no longer works for lowering your reputation and you're still overwhelmed by your sick people, then something's wrong with how you designed and trained your hospital.

[Fringehunter7719]

Took a few screenshots of Mitton University:

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198021742664/screenshots/?appid=535930&sort=newestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=grid

That's June of the fourth year, although I think the last six months are just testing stuff and taking screenshots and so on. Only about 40% of the hospital has been used.

similar to Skirlasvoud's screenshot, the reputation is high despite having no rep on prices:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503394592

Haven't played the hospital long enough to get the staff trained more than about half way:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503394233

Prices are all at 100%, with virtually no refusals to pay:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503394958

General idea of the hospital layout:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503393727
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503393847

It's pretty haphazard, but the rooms are stuffed with furniture so they're all 90%+ attractiveness (as are corridors for the most part) and prestige 5. Only drinks are energy drinks machines, only food is salty snacks vending machines and only entertainment is telephones (why let my patients be entertained for free when I can rip them off for cash I don't need?).

I started the level at +30% prices and only changed to +100% after a couple of years when I was doing some testing. I have no idea if that has any effect or whether +100% from the start would work better (although I'm guessing it would).