Suggestions Box (Mar 2015)

Every month I list five things I'd like to see added, altered or abolished from the game. Because even though my long time of playing Restaurant Story clearly shows I love it, that doesn't mean it's perfect. Some of the ideas I'll air will be significant game changers while others will be low-key and irrelevant in the eyes of many of you readers.

In no particular order, here are this month's entries...

 #91: End the coins per plate calamity

We start with an important suggestion. The three recipes on the second appliance in the Valentine's goals all offered 2 coins per plate, down from the standard 4 coins per plate. And since then this inferior return has been a constant, with all 16 dishes added since yielding only 2 coins per plate.

Love Potion Mixer recipes

This is a problem. The amount of profit you can make from such recipes is not massively different from what we're used to, but the rate at which you can attain that profit is diminished. In particular, if your counters are sufficiently stocked that you won't run out of food overnight, then only two factors can affect your income while you sleep - the efficiency of the layout of your restaurant and the coins per plate of the available dishes. With only 2 coins per plate recipes on counters you'd stand to earn half the number of coins you can gather from standard dishes.

Storm8 need to address this. The signs are that this was introduced to try and improve the number of portions a recipe gives, but the counterbalancing of the coins per plate renders this a moot point. I'd like to see a return to the previous structure or - if it's a necessity that the coins per plate are varied - a more wide range of coins per plate afforded. For every dish yielding just 2 coins per plate there should be another which produces 6 coins per plate.

 #92: Add more staff decorations

This is an adoption of a comment left by regular contributor LauraBeth in last month's Suggestions Box. It would be nice to have more options for staff decorations in our restaurants.

Kitchen section of The Garlic Tree

This may seem a daft suggestion when you look at how well populated my new-look kitchen section is, but hear me out! Of the 12 characters in there only the Swedish Server, 50's Chef, Barista Phoebe and Busboy are individual pieces which are readily available to purchase in the market. The others are all either part of a larger item, found in a box, or a goal prize.

With Barista Phoebe and the Busboy added recently there are indications that the gamemakers are adding more staff decorations, but there is scope for so much more. Not only are kitchen staff craved but also waiters and waitresses. Dressed smartly I'd love to add some suave servers to my main section!

 #93: Allow accepted gifts to be deleted

Any seasoned player will know that you can only accept 20 gifts from neighbours each day. This is somewhat stifling, but I can sort of understand the need for the game's developers to limit the power of gifting.

 Previous Suggestion Box posts

 21/02/15 February 2015
 24/01/15 January 2015
 13/12/14 December 2014
 15/11/14 November 2014
 18/10/14 October 2014

So as a means of introducing a little flexibility without increasing the gift limit, I propose a system where we can choose to delete an already accepted gift on the same day it was received. This would free up a slot which could then be filled with a more useful gift.

I regularly enter a predicament late in the day when I'm just off gift capacity and need to decide whether or not to accept a not so useful gift. I want to fill all my gift slots for the day, but what if I accept it and something better comes along minutes later? Then I'm frozen out of that gift and stuck with something less valuable. This deleting concept would give the opportunity to perform the switch.

 #94: Allow expansions to be undone

Thanks to Fat Bear for this one! Ever found that you don't have enough stuff to fill out your place when redecorating in a certain theme? Or that a design just doesn't fit the size of your diner quite right? These issues would be blitzed with an ability to undo expansions.

At present when you expand it's a one-way action - you can't go back to the previous dimensions. By introducing an 'unexpansion' option Storm8 would be allowing us to re-jig our places to accommodate our designs snugly. In a perfect world this would be free to do and you could interchange between any dimensions you've unlocked and as often as you like. However the gamemakers would probably prefer to charge for this with expansions only being possible to undo one at a time. At least it would be an option though.

 #95: Show overall statistics for players

Over in Restaurant Story 2 there's a cool feature on your 'Restaurant Overview' which shows not only the details about your outlet that you see in RS1, but also some additional information.

Restaurant Story 2 overview window

The statistics on mastery stars, recipes learned, orders cooked, decorations and days open give a proper synopsis of your game which outstrips anything provided by the equivalent window in RS1. It would be great to see some of these numbers shown in the original game, especially for players like myself who have been around for years - I have absolutely no idea how many orders I must have cooked over the years, but I'm sure I'd be flabbergasted!