...as well as the unrealistic guest ride tolerance distribution.
It never made any sense to me. It's as if the game only wants you to build rollercoasters. I get that it's RollerCoaster Tycoon, but if they were going to give us thrill rides and other ride attractions, they should at least make them useful.
For example, let's look at the scrambled eggs attraction. Excitement, intensity, and nausea all have low ratings. It's a snooze-fest for lack of a better term. Just look at the ride! It even moves at like 5 revolutions/hour (or whatever extremely slow rotational speed is suitable, I'm rusty on mah fizzics).
My problem with this is it's incredibly unrealistic. I've ridden a real 'scrambled eggs' a bunch of times in my life. Those things are exciting, and they are intense (nausea may be another thing). Of course, these things are mostly subjective, but I'm sure that most can agree with me when I say that low excitement and intensity for a scrambled eggs ride is a tad ludicrous.
Another example - the go-karts. Like the scrambled eggs, these can very possible get low on all three ratings. Like, seriously? Go-karts? Go-karts are unexciting? Have the developers never been on go-karts before? Go-karts are one of the most fun and interesting things to do at amusement parks because it involves user-interaction and competitiveness instead of just zooming down a rollercoaster track. I understand that not all go-karts are 'exciting' and 'thrilling', but to give a low criteria on go-karts regardless of scenery is outright annoying.
Which brings me to my next point: the rating criteria. Simply put, it is bogus. For the most part, you can spend your time decorating your ride, making it look all fancy and colorful and adding gorgeous scenery and other aesthetic aspects to it, but it won't matter because guests ride for intensity and not excitement. Umm..... hello? That's horribly unrealistic and antagonizing. I can't express how much I've wanted to destroy these games when I heard the guests complain:
-'Rollercoaster/ride 1 looks too intense for me!!!!1'
-'I want to go on something more thrilling than Rollercoaster/ride 1!1!!!1!!one'
Believe it or not, Chris/Atari/Area 52, in real life, some people actually DO find things like merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, monorails, chairlifts and the like entertaining and somewhat thrilling. Heck, even I sometimes get a sense of thrill (and almost fright :/) from the latter two. No seat belts and wobbly carts on heights that extreme make me feel almost unsettled upon the thought of something going horribly wrong while riding those.
Why would they implement this? Like, I get that different guests have different tolerances for intensity, but it still renders the excitement factor for rides almost incredibly useless. They could have completely did away with that and the game wouldn't be changed very much. It sucks because it arbitrarily emphasizes having super high and wicked roller coasters over most gentler other rides and attractions. So basically, your roller coasters lines will be filled up while all the other rides will usually be empty. This is especially true for the first game. They kind of fixed it in RCT2, but then it got even WORSE than RCT1 in RCT3! Almost all of my non-rollercoaster rides with low intensity ratings were almost always empty. It's infuriating.
TL;DR
In RCTW I think they should do one or more of the following possible solutions:
1.) Do away with excitement and intensity altogether and make another judgement criteria that 'encompasses' both that is less subjective. What exactly should it be and be called? I'm not exactly sure.
2.) Have more realistic guests and a more fair distribution of ride criteria tolerance. That is, have more guests that actually like the slower, gentler rides.
3.) Not have the excitement rating basically pointless. Especially if they don't actually bother to explain the bare significance of such and how to take advantage of it in the game.
4.) Have more realistic ride criteria. So no labeling scrambled eggs/go-karts/3D cinema/etc.etc.etc. as boring and dull.
So yeah, sorry for sounding so rage-y.
Feel free to agree/disagree with me below.