Pay vs customer satisfaction and other thoughts

[LordShame]

Before I begin, I have to say I don't know much about the current status of the mechanics I'm going to talk about. So maybe some of the stuff I'm going to suggest is already in the game. If that's the case, then great!

Also, I'm running solely on my own logic here, so there will probably flaws. But I hope I can get the gist of it across.

Alright, so. Right now, it feels like the way whores make money is weird. It seems to me that a guy comes in, picks a girl, does his business, and then pays an arbitrary amount of money (or doesn't pay). Well, it's not arbitrary per se, but you don't really get to influence it. Plus the "average pay per customer" stat kind of implies that the customer pays what he thinks the girl was worth, which is a nutty way to run a brothel.

Here's a step-by-step description of a system that'd make sense to me. It's probably not the only good one (if it's even a good one at all) but it's my thought anyway.

1.
The client comes in, and sees the girls. He picks one, and chooses what he wants to do with her (normal sex, anal, BDSM, that sort of thing). He's then given a price.

2.
The client decides if he wants to pay that price according to several factors:
-If he has enough money on him to pay. (And if he doesn't, is he willing to lie about it?)
-If the girl's hot enough.
-If the girl has fetish traits he likes.
-If the girl has fetish traits he dislikes.
-If he's horny enough. (I don't know if a customer has a libido stat, but it could be used to determine if he's horny enough to lower his standards to pay for a girl he normally wouldn't want.)
-If the girl is famous.
-If he's had a good time with that specific girl before.
-If the brothel has a good reputation for customer satisfaction.
-The girl's skills shouldn't actually matter at this point, since the customer doesn't know how good the girl is until he actually does her. There should be word of mouth but that goes into fame.

3.
If the customer agrees to the price, he gets to do his business with the girl, and the process continues to 4. If he says no, he can either pick another girl or another act and get a new price to decide on (back to 1), or he can just leave.

4.
When the deed is done, the customer decides if he's had his money's worth. That's where the sex skills come in. If he's had a lot for his money, your customer satisfaction rating and your fame are increased, and he might even be inclined to tip the girl extra. If he feels he was ripped off, satisfaction decreases, and that's where he might turn violent, beating up the girl and confronting the guards.

So that's the process in a nutshell, but there's one element that I haven't mentioned yet. I'd like to be able to adjust the price, per girl, per type of service. All girls would have default prices of course, like they have now, because otherwise it would get very fiddly very fast, but I would like to be able to change them individually if I care to. Maybe by adjusting a percentage of the base, maybe by outright typing in a number.

Why?

First reason:
Let's say I have a girl with 5% normal sex skill and 80% BDSM skill. If a guy comes in and wants do her regular-style, I know he's probably not going to have a great time, so maybe I'll give him a discount. It won't be the best sex of his life but if anyone ever asks him how it went, he'll say "it wasn't great, but the price was right". But if another guy comes in and wants to do a BDSM session with her, I know he'll have a great time and I know I can charge him an arm and a leg for it. So I'll set her normal sex rate to 15 gold, and her BDSM rate to 125 gold, and everyone's having a good time.

But the way things are now, if she's got, say, a 60 gold flat rate, I have two problems. The guy who just wants her pussy will have paid too much and he'll leave angry, and the guy who wants to tie her up and whip her won't have given me as much money as he might have. I have no control over anything and their satisfaction is out of my hands. If (customer's satisfaction = girl's skill - girl's price), I'd like to control the price.

Second reason:
If I can change prices, strategic options open to me. If I underprice my girls, customers get more for their money, and my fame and customer satisfaction increase. Eventually I can increase my prices, once my name is established and I have a good customer base. If I overprice my girls, I'll take a hit to customer satisfaction, but I'll make a lot of money for a few turns, until people catch on and word of mouth spreads. Then I can turn around and use some of that money on advertisement to counter the negative publicity.

Third reason:
Coupled with the customer decision system above, the looks % stops becoming the be-all-end-all value for a girl.

If I have a girl with 25% looks and 100% to all sex skills, she might have a hard time in the beginning, since very few clients would pick her. If I can lower her price, more guys will pick her and get to see how good she really is in the sack. Her fame will increase and over time it will compensate for her low looks.

On the other hand, a girl with 100% looks and zeroes in sex skills will bring in lots of customers who will pick her based on how pretty she is, but none of them will be satisfied and my reputation will sink. If I can lower her price, they won't mind so much that she fucks like a dead fish. Eventually her skills will increase and over time I'll be able to raise her price again. The "when" and the "how much" is all-new strategic depth.

Fourth reason:
This system can be used to mark differences between free girls and slave girls. If I have a slave girl, I can charge whatever I want, since I'm the one taking all the money anyway. But if I have a free girl, she might not appreciate being undervalued since that's less money for her. Heck, it might even be interesting to let free girls price themselves. Bring the confidence stat in the equation (more confidence = more likely to raise her own price) and you now have a new thing that makes girls different from one another! In addition, it stops confidence from being a "bad" stat that you want to decrease at all costs, because if a girl's confidence is too low she may tend to underprice herself and make you less money than she should.

Fifth reason:
If I have an otherwise excellent girl with low constitution or the Fragile trait, she's going to get tired out quickly. If I raise her price, it'll weed out some customers but it'll spare her health.

Sixth reason:
This is kind of a tangent, but still... I like how we can forbid specific types of sex per brothel. But what if, we could also put up a price multiplier? You could have a brothel where, say, bondage is usually not accepted, but if the client is willing to pay five times the usual cost, something can be arranged. Kind of like a premium service, you know?

Alright, that's about it. I know there's a lot of complexity in there, but I'm just brainstorming. I'd rather put out a lot of stuff that gets trimmed or outright rebutted than not say a thing at all. And sorry for the wall of text again, heheh.

[zodiac44]

I like the price-setting idea, though I would rather see it done in a more abstract manner.  The girls' services should be auto-priced to some normal value dependent on their skill/stat combo for the activity in question, and the player would have the option to set a multiplier on the auto-calculated price.  That way, prices would auto-adjust as the girl gets better, but if you set her up with a cheap multiplier, she stays cheaper-than-normal until you change it.

This would allow establishing a price-differentiated line of whores, not dissimilar to the entry-level, mass market, luxury segmentation in the auto industry.  Now if only we could find a way to replicate that "new whore" smell...  >;o)

[LordShame]

Yeah, that's more sensible than changing prices by hand every time the values change. Good point.

I also had a thought that you could set a % per brothel, so you could easily have like a 50%-off week to boost clientele, or just make a house generally cheaper or high-class.

[DocClox]

Interesting idea. I'd be up for it, probably using zodiac's multiplier suggestion, just so long as the defaults remained playable. I don't mind adding some micro-management options, but not everyone is going to want to use them.

It'd also be nice to be able to set multipliers on a per-girl and per-brothel basis. If you have a house in a poor area and you drop the girl's prices you'll make it back up in volume (although there's a limit to how many punters a girl can see in one night, obviously). Rich areas, you could put the prices way up, but you'd need excellent girls or the customers would stay away. Not that we have city areas as such, yet.

We don't currently simulate customers in enough detail to factor in return business. The game creates a pool of random customers at startup, but doesn't save them. When a game is re-loaded a new random pool is generated, so any history would be lost. Similarly we don't have fetish dislikes yet (but it's a worthwhile suggestion) .

I'm not sure offhand how much fame is factored in at the moment. If we do do that, it should be in combination with customer happiness. A famous brothel with a low customer happiness rating has a bad reputation, and will drive customers away. So if the customer pays for a night with a girl and doesn't have a good time, the customer happiness drops. This is survivable for a starting brothel, since no-one expects that much of it, but potentially disastrous for a famous one.

Disclaimer: half asleep at keyboard, may be talking total cobblers.

[letmein]

I like the idea in theory, but I feel that someone should mention that the player can easily get upwards of one, or even two, hundred girls.  Altering the charged price of each is going to be a bitch of micromanagement.  Now, there are certainly those who are OCD enough to like that, but there are a lot of other people who don't.

Now, I realize there have already been a couple suggestions to alleviate this;  Doc's always big on 'make it an option!', but I'm more of the view that if it's not going to be more than a cosmetic change to the game, but not considered essential enough to be made a permanent part of the game, you shouldn't put it in.  z went with a multiplier system, based off auto-pricing;  I'm not sure I like this either.  If your auto-pricing system is set up properly, then it should already be spitting out the prime values for each girl, and changing them would hurt the player in the majority of cases.  In this situation, then, all that has been accomplished is to switch out an already-working, behind-the-scenes system for a not-yet-programmed, perhaps-not-working, behind-the-scenes system.  Net loss, and as always, I'm against needless or valueless additions.

As I said to start, though, I like the principle of the thing, I just want to hear some better arguments to make it practical as well.  1-2-3-GO!

[DocClox]

I like the idea in theory, but I feel that someone should mention that the player can easily get upwards of one, or even two, hundred girls. Altering the charged price of each is going to be a bitch of micromanagement.  Now, there are certainly those who are OCD enough to like that, but there are a lot of other people who don't.

Hell, I don't want to tweak all of them either. That'd be silly. But it'd be nice to be able to fine tune key girls. Or to micromanage the hell out of them when you only have 5 and need every last penny coming in.

z went with a multiplier system, based off auto-pricing;  I'm not sure I like this either.  If your auto-pricing system is set up properly, then it should already be spitting out the prime values for each girl, and changing them would hurt the player in the majority of cases. 

I think I'd like auto-pricing to deliver prices that were good, but not necessarily optimal. Then you can always optimise things a bit if you want, but not doing it shouldn't impact on anyone's game. The money supply is about to become very configurable. If you don't like the tweaking aspects, just bump up a couple of income multipliers, and you'll never see the need for it. On the other hand, if you like the challenge when resources are scarce, this will be a good thing...

In this situation, then, all that has been accomplished is to switch out an already-working, behind-the-scenes system for a not-yet-programmed, perhaps-not-working, behind-the-scenes system. 

I think I'd make it a mod to the existing system. Add factors for each act, but use the current pricing scheme. Possibly with a few elaborations. I can't see it being that big a deal.

That said, I am a born optimist where theses things are concerned...

[zodiac44]

Well, if the price a customer pays plays into their satisfaction and the brothel's reputation, as was suggested, then the base prices are not necessarily optimal.  Lowering prices would increase customer satisfaction for those just starting out.  Raising prices would increase income in brothels with a strong, positive reputation (and may even lead to increases in customer satisfaction - look at the Apple effect: customers pay more expecting higher quality, and by virtue of paying more, they perceive that they received the higher quality they were expecting).  If we differentiate customers across neighborhoods, then it makes sense to price differently as well.  The base prices would be too high to attract any customers to a brothel in the slums, while they would be excessively cheap for a brothel servicing the upper class neighborhood.

I would also argue for the option to set a multiplier for an entire brothel, either in place of or in addition to the option to do it for individual girls (individual settings could override or stack with the brothel settings, as long as it is made clear).

[LordShame]

I understand the typical game grows to having lots and lots of girls, and there's no way I'd insist on having to micromanage every last one of them; that's why the game needs to keep a sort of auto-adjusting default value for prices, pretty much the way things are done now (but better balanced so it's not so easy).

That said, personally, as the game is now, I find the most enjoyment in the early struggle. If I can afford it, every week I go to the slave market and buy the girl with the lowest looks. If I can't find one under 60% I pick the one with the most rebellion. For a long time, everything I do requires a personal touch. I go to the market to outfit a new girl; I have 800 gold in my pockets, and I have to make a decision between buying fur sandals for 200 and high heels for 500. If I decide to advertise, or bribe the government, or hire a matron, I must have had a couple of weeks with steady income before I know I can afford it. I have to take a chance with catacombs because sending a gang down there costs 300. It takes at least six weeks for one of my girls to make that much, but I'm feeling lucky, and I know that if my team come back with at least a B-grade item, it's gonna be a big help. I usually turn off BDSM and Bestiality at the beginning, but sometimes times are tough, and maybe I need to allow one just to make ends meet.

I love that. I really do. I know that's not how everybody feels, so that's why there needs to be automation and sensible default settings, but I like the idea that things could still be tweaked further in these stages if I care to.