A couple of weeks ago the Technicolor Cake was added to Restaurant Story.
It is no ordinary recipe. At the time of writing, the cake yields 258 XP for 6 hours of work. But only 123 XP is given when the cake is served. The remaining 135 XP is rewarded just for preparing it!
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| Technicolor Cake |
I'm almost certain that this is an error on TeamLava's part and that it will be fixed eventually. But while this flaw exists, let's have a think about the implications...
Because of the lack of a need to wait for the dish to cook, you are in effect now able to buy yourself XP. The exchange rate is based around the cost of the Technicolor Cake, so for 1,300 coins you can harvest 135 XP. To exploit the error repeatedly just store the ovens and then replace them. This removes the cake, all set for another batch.
Of course you're losing the profit of the cake, so is it a financially viable process? Well I'm not certain of this but I think 803,618 XP is needed to reach level 99, so how much would it cost to propel yourself to this figure from scratch? A quick calculation informs me that you'd need to prepare 5,953 batches of the Technicolor Cake or, with a full bank of 18 slots, 331 batches in order to go from level 1 to 99. That converts to just over 7.7 million coins.
So it's certainly plausible to artificially push yourself up to the top level, although this is obviously flawed for numerous reasons, chiefly because a level 1 player isn't going to have 7.7 million coins going spare! It's really just hypothetical!
Continuing in the same vein, what about the mysterious level 100? Back in April the amount of XP needed to reach level 100 was increased massively, meaning that in effect one billion XP is required to bridge the impossible gap. You'd need to churn out 7.4 million Technicolor Cakes to amass the necessary XP, at a cost of... 9.6 billion coins. Ouch.
So in summary, this XP black hole is not sufficient to bring level 100 into the picture, although it can allow some fast levelling up further down the pyramid. Of course there's an argument to be made for saying that exploiting this mistake is a form of cheating and partially defeats the purpose of the game. I tend to agree and would much prefer to level up by the usual methods. But it's interesting to look at the possibilities all the same!
I could be wrong here, but I think these calculations are based on preparing the cake with an Easy Oven. If preparing and serving this cake with a regular Oven, as with all other dishes, the prepare/serve XP portions are different, and you only get +90XP for preparing on the regular Oven and get the remainder when you serve the dish. Although not important at all, I thought some might like to know about the difference between Easy Oven and Normal Oven prepare/serve ratios.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the wait for a reply!
DeleteThat's something I didn't know - thanks very much for that info. I think this makes it even clearer that this is an error of some description. I've noticed that the current goal recipes are also paying out a disproportionate amount of XP for the preparation taps. I would suggest that TeamLava will fix this before long. :)