TCG Card Shop Simulator - Everything Customers

A thorough guide to everything customer related!

How Much Can Customers Spend?

First thing everyone wants to know is how much a customer can spend. Maybe you've gotten lucky and pulled a foil full art early and want to sell it for easy cash. Well, there is a maximum limit as to how much a customer can have and it's all based on these factors:

• Your Shop Level.
• How many Shop Expansions you've unlocked.
• If you've unlocked the Shop Lot B (And how many expansions you've unlocked for Shop B).

And the formula goes as such:

100 + ((Shop Level - 1) * 100) + (Shop A Expansions * 250) + (Shop B Expansions * 400) + 500 (If Shop B is Unlocked) Note: The Shop Level part of this formula is based off what you see your shop level to be, not what the code says it is. The code always says the Shop Level is 1 less than what you see in the game, hence the -1 part in there.

So to put that funky formula into words, here's how to calculate the maximum money a customer can have:

1. Start off at $100.
2. Add $100 for every Shop Level. ($9,900 at Lvl 100)
3. Add $250 for each Shop A Expansion you've unlocked. ($5,000 Total)
4. If you've unlocked Shop B, add $500.
5. Then add $400 for each Shop B Expansion. ($3,200 Total)

Giving a value of $18,700 at Lvl 100.

(There is an absolute limit of $30,000 which you will reach at Lvl 213)

Wealthy Customers

That's not the end of it. Some customers can be considered Wealthy or Slightly Wealthy (Made up terms, not actually defined in the code).

About 0.3% of customers will be considered Wealthy and will have between $300 and the max amount value * 4.

About 5% of customers will be considered Slightly Wealthy and will have between $40 and the max amount value * 2.

Otherwise, the regular ol customer will have between $20 and the max amount value.

So TLDR: the absolute maximum a customer can have in their pockets/credit card is $120,000 (if you're lucky and have grinded all the way to Lvl 213!).

How Many Customers Can I Have?

The formula for calculating how many customers you can have in your shop at once is a bit complicated, but it's based on the following:

• Your Shop Level.
• How many Shop A Expansions you've unlocked.
• How many Customers are currently playing at a table.

Without going into how the following values are calculated (because it's slightly complicated to explain let alone write down), here are the specific values at each Shop Level and Expansion:

Shop Level:

Shop A Expansions:

After that, the formula is as follows:

1 + Shop Level Value + Shop A Expansion Value + Ceil(Num of Customers Playing / 2) (The Ceil function just means rounded up. So in this case, if the value ends up as 1.5, it'll round up to 2)

Just to clarify: the last part of the formula is just the number of customers sitting down to play divided by 2 and rounded up. Typically, this means the number of play tables with at least one person sitting down but there can be times where two customers are waiting at separate tables (which only contributes an extra customer from both waiting players rather than two).

There is a max cap of 28 so despite having a Shop Level of 200 and every Shop A Expansion, you'll be capped at that many people.

What Makes A Customer Buy Something?

There's a few things that contribute to a customer buying an item from your shop.

Customers with a Target Item

One of the main things is their Target Buy Item List which some customers that spawn want at least 1 item that you are able to unlock at your level. Even if you haven't unlocked it, it can still appear on their list.

Customers can have a maximum of 4 items on their list and it's always random across what you can unlock.

These sort of customers have a set chance to spawn at specific shop levels:

How a Customer Selects a Shelf

When a customer enters your store, they may either go to a random shelf or straight to the shelf that has one of their target items. If you don't have your target item available, they'll go to a random shelf before stating that they can't find the item.

Any customer going through that "random" shelf process will first have about a 33% chance to check out any cards you have selling if you have any displaying. This chance does raise to about 48% only when it's afternoon.

I'd like to clarify here that when a customer selects a random shelf, I mean they will select a random compartment on that shelf that actually has items.

How Many Items They'll Take

Firstly, the customer will see how many of the item they are looking at exists on a shelf compartment. They'll then randomly select a number between 0 and that number of items (up to a max of 13).

Then, they'll see if the item relates to cards in some way. If it isn't, then that number is halved. Anything that is relating to cards includes card packs, card boxes, battle decks, and card sleeves.

Also, they'll see if it's a deodorant. If it is and the customer is smelly, then they won't buy one. Otherwise, they are limited to 3 deodorants.

Note, if a customer decided to buy 0 of an item during this process and the item isn't a booster pack, then there's a 75% chance that the number will bump up to 1 so that the customer will at least get something.

The customer will then go through the probability of buying (Customer Evaluation of Price) for each item until they go through that amount or run out of money to be able to spend.

For cards, they only go through the probability of buying.

Customer Evaluation of Price

When a customer finally reaches a shelf and decided they want to purchase a specific amount of one item, they'll evaluate the price of the item compared to it's market price for every individual item they want to take.

The formula is just just the percentage of the Shelf Price compared to the Market Price put as an evaluation. Here's the formula:

PercentFromMarket = Round((Set Price - Market Price) / Market Price * 100)

There is a special case for anything with a market price under $2 in which the following will be applied after (If you don't understand below, you really don't need to worry about it. It just makes the evaluation less important for lower priced items):

PercentFromMarket(2) = Round(PercentFromMarket / Lerp(1, 10, (0 < (2 - marketPrice) / 2 < 1)))

Basically, anything lower than the market price will result in a negative value and vice versa for anything above the market price resulting in a positive value. For example:

If a plushie has a Market Price of $10. If you set the price to $9, this value will be -10 because it's -10% off Market Price. If you set the price to $15 then the value will be +50 because it's 50% more than the Market Price.

That being said, here's the percentages for how likely a customer is to buy an item per each evaluation value:

(Note: There are evaluation percentages between each value, they are just linear. For example: +15 is exactly middle between 75% and 60%, that being 67.5%)

Of course, they'll also check to see if they have enough money. If they don't, well they can't make money out of thin air and they'll just go to check out or move to another shelf if they don't have anything yet.

When Will Customers Play?

Some Customers like to just come in and play a friendly game! So here's some info about that.

If a customer has not currently played a game, bought any item, or is an angry customer (found your tables too expensive to play), then they will have a certain chance of wanting to play a game depending on the time of day:

• 18% in the morning.
• 33% in the afternoon.
• 63% in the evening.
• 73% in the night.
• Added 25% if there is a player waiting at a table to play

If they do succeed any of these checks, a player will always first go find a table with someone waiting to play. If there isn't anyone waiting, they'll go sit by themselves.

Once they have finished playing, the customers have about a 60% chance to immediately pay for the items they have or leave the shop. Otherwise, they'll try to do something else.

If the customer is by themselves, they'll start a timer between 5 and 30 seconds. Once the timer finishes, the customer will get up because they are too lonely and no one wants to play with them.

Customers Queuing to Play

If a customer tries to sit down at a table where there's a game already being played, they have a 70% chance of giving up and go do something else. The other 30% will try to queue for a game (so long as there's no one already queuing at that table) and you'll see that when a customer is just kinda standing next to a play table watching.

Any customer queuing for a game will start a timer exactly like the one above (5 to 30 seconds), Once timer finishes, they'll have a 40% chance to pay for the items they have or leave the shop. Otherwise, they'll try to do something else.

Quick Note on Time of Day

If you're wondering what constitutes as "afternoon" or "evening" in this game, here are the time periods:

• 8:00am-12:00pm: Morning
• 12:00pm-4:00pm: Afternoon
• 4:00pm-6:30pm: Evening
• 6:30pm-9:00pm: Night

Play Table Fees

Similar to how customers will determine if an item is too expensive to buy, they'll also evaluate the playing event fee you have. It uses the same formula but instead of being out of 100, it's out of 90. This makes it so if the fee is at the market price (aka what nearby stores charge). Here are the chances per percentage from market price:

How Customer's Decide What To Do?

Customer's go through quite a train of thought when it comes to picking what to do. So for this, I'm just gonna go through the process up to down and give a basic summary of how a Customer thinks when they decide what to do.

First off, it's noted that if a customer ever fails to find/buy an item (aka going to a shelf that has nothing on it, failing to play at a table due to price or picking a table someone's already at, or attempting to pick up an item that's too dear for them), they will keep track of how many times that's happened. After each failed attempt, a number between 1 and 5 is randomly generated and if the number of failed attempts to buy something happens to be greater than the random number, they'll leave the store/check out whatever items they are currently holding.

This also occurs if the customer is attempting to pathfind to a shelf or play table but for some reason it's blocked off or can't exactly reach it ). Play Tables actually use both "item attempts" and "shelf attempts" but the "shelf attempt" part is for when they can't pathfind rather than play at a table.

Customers will check if they want to play at a table first (refer to When Do Customers Play?). Failing that check, they'll see if they to buy a card (refer to How a Customer Selects a Shelf. Failing that check, they'll try to buy something so long as they haven't already checked out.

Next, basically after every successful interaction (standing at a valid shelf and going through the process of picking items/cards), they'll decide if they wanna leave. This decision is based on 3 checks:

• If the volume of items they are carrying are more than 50 units.*
• If the items they have cost more than their maximum money (aka they broke after visiting your expensive store)
• If they just decide they wanna leave (50%).

If they pass any of these checks, they'll try to checkout/leave the store.

So in theory, if a customer ends up holding 6 card boxes (48 units) they can still buy another 7 boxes for a total of 13 boxes.

Other than that, they'll keep looping shelves so long as the above checks fail. Most of the time, you'll have a customer go between 1-3 shelves getting items and then go check out.

*Note: Item volume is independently set by the developer but it's based on the width, height, and length of the object. As a rule of thumb, an item's volume is just 64 divide by how many you can put into a large cardboard box. E.g: a card pack is 1 volume unit, and a card box is 8 volume units. The only exceptions I've found are the card sleeves (1.5 units each) and battle decks (4.5 units each) which is close enough to the calculated value.

Stinky Customers!

We all hate the stinky customers that come into your shop and cause havoc! Well, here's what you need to know:

The percentage chance of having a customer spawn as a stinky customer is:

2 + ((Shop Level - 1) / 2) % Note, there is a maximum cap of 17% which you will reach at level 31.

This percentage does raise 3% when it's in the Evening and 5% when it's Night time, for a total of 20% and 22% maximum respectfully.

Of course, there is a maximum number of stinky customers that can exist around your shop at once. The formula looks like:

((Shop Level - 1) / 5) + 1

So at Shop Level 101, you can have a maximum of 21 smelly customers existing at once.

(Since the maximum number of customers that can ever be in the world is 28, you'd need to be Lvl 136 for every customer to potentially be stinky)

Stinky Customers Affecting Others

If a stinky customer is within 3 units (typically 3 meters in a Unity game) of another customer, then that other customer may be bothered by the stink. For every stinky customer that is in the store at once, a customer has a 15% chance (additive) to want to leave or if they have an item to purchase, they'll immediately go to a checkout.

Adding onto this, stinky customers are not affected by other stinky customers. In theory, you could have a whole store of stinky card collectors and nothing will be affected (except maybe if you have Mysophobia, then yeah you may get nightmares).

Spraying The Stinky Away!

As you know, one of the main mechanics of the game is spraying stinky customers so that they don't bother other customers! The basic info you need to know is that stinky customers have a stink value of 10. Spraying customers yourself takes 1 stinky value away per 0.15 seconds (1.5 seconds to fully destinkify a customer), while the small, medium, and large auto sprayers take away 5, 7.5, and 10 stinky values respectfully when activated (every 3 seconds).

Customer Satisfaction

A customer will only be dissatisfied if they do one or more of the following:

• Haven't purchased an item.
• Haven't purchased a card.
• Haven't played at a play table.

The main reasons why any of these 3 would occur is if:

• Your prices are too high.
• They can't find the item on their list.
• They can't find an empty play table seat.
• They can't find the checkout.
• They can't find any items on any shelves they've internally checked.

Dissatisfied customers don't affect your game whatsoever. They are just a stat that is saved to your game.

Customer Reviews

When a customer leaves the store, they will usually write a review on your store about their experience! These reviews can be about one of these subjects:

• Item Variety - How many different items you have. Affected by Target Item buyers.
• Item Price - Too high, bad review. Low, good review.
• Card Price - Same as Item Price.
• Card Rarity - If a customer can't buy a card but likes the price, they'll comment on the rarity.
• Play Table Price - Same as Item price.
• Smelly Customers - Too many smelly customers = bad shop.
• Blocked Store - I CAN'T GET IN! I CAN'T GET OUT!
• Opening Packs too close to Customers - Do your job and stop opening packs.
• Being given too many coins as change - I wouldn't like to be handed 100 coins too.
• Generic Review - If they can't make a unique one, they'll pick one from here.

Whenever a customer does one of these actions, they will add a review entry to a list they keep until they leave the store. As they leave the store, they'll randomly select one of these reviews to then post on your review app for you to see.

Firstly, each review has a rating displayed as stars. When a review entry is added the number of stars will be set by the level of the review (negative/neutral/positive). Negative reviews will always start off at 1 star, neutrals will be set as 3 stars, and positive reviews are at 4 stars.

Each review also comes with a percentage to add an extra star. Initially, just before a review is posted, it has a 50% chance to add an extra star. This is increase or decrease by the extra star chance depending on what kind of review is chosen. So to get a 5 star review, one of the reviews in the customer's list would have to be a 4 star positive review and then pass that 50% (plus whatever the extra star chance) to be upgraded to a 5 star.

You can only ever have 30 reviews at a time that affect your average. If you have 30 and one more gets added, it removes the oldest review from the app.

Extra Info

Just a few little pieces of info about customers that don't really affect the game at all:

• Some customers are faster than others. Each customer spawns with a random speed modifier between 0 and 0.25. It's very minor but some customers do walk a tiny bit faster!
• About 10% of customers are chatty. They'll always say something about what they buy, can't buy, can't find, etc. Other customers only have a chance to say something.

Source

This guide is based on information from the original source: Steam Community Guide.