A study of Buy Bars
LordHellscream:
Here are something i've observed about buy bars
1. The more expensive the item is the harder it is to raise the bar. Say you can dazzle (gold badge sales interaction) once and completely fill a buy bar of someone who is buying a TV set, but you only raise the buy bar a tiny little bit with a dazzle when you try to sell your 200k community lot ownership deed.
2. It seems like it has nothing to do with whether an item is expensive or cheap, only the amount matters, so dazzle someone to buy a $8000 plasma TV set raise the buy bar the same amount as dazzling someone to buy a $8000 puddle. Though other factors make it harder to sell $8000 puddle than a $8000 plasma tv.
3. The buy bar raises slowly on its own, customer loyalty and business ranking probably (not sure) make it raises faster or start at a higher level. The most important factor is if the item is at a reasonable price. So if the price is set at rediculously cheap the buy bar raises faster than if the item is set at average price.
4. The buy bar goes down slowly if the item is set to be anything higher than average, the more expensive the item is the faster it goes down. Luckily the buy bar doesnt start from 0, so you will have a few seconds to get to the customer and do sales interaction before the bar drop to zero and at that point the customer is no longer interested and the loyalty is also gonna be taking a hit.
5. Thus it is basically impossible to sell someone a 200k community lot at anything higher than average price, because every second the buy bar drop more than you can boost with any sales interaction (including manipulate)
6. When a customer is autonomously browsing an item it is much easier to boost the buy bar than when they browsing an item you are showing them. so "Access..Desire" and "Look for Mark" is kinda useless, cuz even a customer is "willing to buy" and "interested in that huge plasma tv" you will still have a hard time selling to him than if he autonomously trying to buy it.
8. Cheap or expensive? if you are selling some items at averge, and some other items at expensive, then customers are more likely to buy the cheaper value items than the more expensive ones. But if you sell everything at same price level (say very expensive) then they will be as likely to buy the same item as if all items are set to cheap.
9. Then the BIG question is, should i sell items at cheap or expensive? It depends, if there are many items in your store, its is better to set price at average, because there are always more people browsing than the number of sales people. the buy bars goes up on its on so you dont have to worry about losing customers. when your business is getting successful with high rank and alot of loyal customers, sometimes customers even buy things like plasma tv on their own without sales helping. If you set price at expensive then you can lose a lot of customers who are not being handled by your salesperson in time. because their buy bars goes down slowly.
On the other hand, if your store is only selling a few items, then it is probably a better idea to set the price to be more expensive, just to make sure every buying customer is being handled by a salesperson.
10. Spot the poor and get them out of your shop asap! if a sim is too poor, he wont buy anything. he only wanna hang out and blocking other potential customers from entering your lot.
10. Exploiting the loopholes: sales interactions like dazzle raise the buy bar by a fixed amount, the only difference is that the higher cost item has a bigger buy bar (all bars look the same but u will notice that it takes alot more dazzle to fill buy bar of 50k item than a 5k item) but you can fill the buy bar of most items you buy (10k or lower) with one at most 2 dazzle.
I set up a pay to stay business, the suggested average ticket price is $87/hour, and i set it at $800 using the custom pricing, the game consider anything $129 or high rediculously expensive, but afterall it is still only $800 i can get anyone to buy it with one dazzle. so now my business ranking is 8, i have 8 customers at a time, i can keep them on poker tables and hot tub forever with snapdragon all over the place. I'm making 800x8x24 = $156,400 a day with no effort, no employee and no expenses. (they dont even need to eat or anything because of those overpowered plants)
and often they will sleep on my lot (have echo's sleep enabled hack) when their energy gets really low, hell, they wont even sleep if i dont want them to, just have my servo rally forth them over and over.
my electronic store probably make more than this a day but this requires no attention at all. i only need to dazzle them once when they come and invite them to the poker table/hot tub and they are on their own, paying me 800 an hour.
angelyne:
Thanks. That was great.
Seriously though :) Good info there! I'm not going to use the loopholes because I prefer realistic play, but now I understand lots more about the game. (very well explained btw). This is better than the prima guide.
Gus Smedstad:
Interesting stuff. Clearly even though the bar always appears to be the same size, in actual fact it has a scale that depends on price. You should think of higher priced items as having a bigger bar.
I thought relative price (cheap or expensive) affected the size of the bar, but from what you say it affects the natural rate of fill of the bar. The cheaper it is compared to wholesale, the faster the bar rises on its own. Above "average," the fill rate is actually negative.
I'd already noticed that low-priced items required no sales help to sell, and that high-priced items required sales interactions. This clarifies the mechanism.
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When a customer is autonomously browsing an item it is much easier to boost the buy bar than when they browsing an item you are showing them. so "Access..Desire" and "Look for Mark" is kinda useless, cuz even a customer is "willing to buy" and "interested in that huge plasma tv" you will still have a hard time selling to him than if he autonomously trying to buy it.
I'd explored those due to advice from this board, and given up on them. I'd "assess... desire," but every time I tried to "show item," the interaction failed and the customer got a negative loyalty hit. Maybe these work if you already have a high relationship with the target, but I've given up on them because they always fail, and I don't know why.
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9. Then the BIG question is, should i sell items at cheap or expensive?
I disagree with your conclusion. Rather, I'd say that it makes the most sense to have a lot of lower-price, Average items, and a few high-price, Ridiculously Expensive items. The lower priced stuff will sell with little or no sales intervention. The big-ticket items will require a Dazzle or two to sell, but if the item's ordinary price is high enough that it usually requires sales help to sell, you might as well price it very high since you need Dazzle anyway. The obvious codicil is that you shouldn't have more of these items than you can reasonably handle with your salesmen. You probably can't count on employees for this, only controllable sims.
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i only need to dazzle them once when they come and invite them to the poker table/hot tub and they are on their own, paying me 800 an hour.
Yeah, that definitely falls into the category of "exploits." Some people will pursue this anyway, like the Sport of Kings, so it's worth mentioning.
- Gus
LordHellscream:
Quote from: angelyne on 2006 March 10, 17:05:40
Thanks. That was great.
Seriously though :) Good info there!
heh thanks, remember this is not from official guide or anything, just stuffs i noticed from observation
angelyne:
Quote from: LordHellscream on 2006 March 10, 17:11:09
Quote from: angelyne on 2006 March 10, 17:05:40
Thanks. That was great.
Seriously though :) Good info there!
heh thanks, remember this is not from official guide or anything, just stuffs i noticed from observation
No it's probably better than the official guide
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