Buzz rating is an important but little understood factor in Cafe World. The buzz rating is what determines the level of foot traffic into your cafe, and therefore how many dishes you can serve in any given time period. Ultimately, it determines how many coins you can make in the game. You'll find the buzz rating in the upper-right corner of your screen. It's a number that can reach as high as 105.
Your buzz rating is impacted by the overall experience that customers have when visiting your cafe and there are essentially two elements involved.
- How long it takes a customer to find a seat
- Can your cusotmer be served with food quickly enough?
If a customer cannot sit down at all, or it takes too long for a waiter to bring over food, that customer will leave and give you a negative buzz rating. Customers who do find a seat and are served within a reasonable time frame leave positive buzz rating, along with tips. A negative buzz rating will remove 1 point, while a positive one will only add .1 to your score. As you'll quickly learn, your buzz rating can drop quickly when things are going wrong and it takes much longer to build back up. So it's vital to keep things moving along quickly in your cafe if you want the best possible success.
But don't worry, because keeping your buzz rating high is very easy to do as long as you understand and follow a few basic guidelines.
An obvious first step is to be certain that you have enough tables and chairs for all of your customers. Only one person can sit at a table, so there's no point in putting more than one chair at a table, unless you're interested in that for aesthetic reasons. It's critical to maintain open pathways to all of your tables and chairs. If something is blocking the path, your customers won't be able to sit on the chair, and your waiters won't be able to serve the table.
Second, always make sure you have food to serve. If there's no food ready to go on your serving tables, customers will arrive and not get served and your buzz rating will plummet quickly. There are a couple of things you can do to prevent this. By planning out a cooking schedule, you can make sure there are always items to be served on your counter and dishes cooking on your stove. Look at the cooking time for each dish and plan accordingly. Bear in mind that you can use multiple stoves to prepare a dish, but once it's served it will only occupy one counter. You will also want to plan for your overnight hours and schedule many longer preparation time dishes for then so that they don't spoil on your stoves. In addition to the lost coins, it's more likely that your existing food supplies will dwindle to nothing.
Third, as you level up in the game, you can hire more waiters. You'll want to do so as it costs no money and allows you to serve more customers in a timely fashion. It's a major mistake to have plenty of tables, chairs and food, but not enough staff to serve your customers in time.
Try these additional strategies for maintaining a high buzz rating in Cafe World:
- Did you know that you can trap your waiters behind counters to serve food faster? Trapping is easy, just place additional items like stoves and furniture around the waiters. Make sure, though, that there is at least one empty space behind each counter. If each waiter can’t get to all of the counters with food on them, orders from customers will go unfulfilled and your buzz rating will plummet. Once you have fully blocked your waiters behind your counters, they’ll serve the food immediately. This has a dramatic effect on the time needed to serve a customer and will keep them very happy.
- Place lots of entrances from the street to your cafe. The basic door is free in Cafe World, so you can add as many as you want to your cafe. By providing lots of places for your customers to get in and out of your cafe, it’s easier for them to move to different parts of your cafe to find a seat quickly, and more visitors can make their way through your cafe so you can achieve a good buzz rating faster.
- Out of food to serve? Remove all the doors to your cafe. If you’re waiting for a few meals to finish and don’t have anything to serve at the moment, you can remove the doors by dragging them down into your customize toolbox. If customers can’t get inside, they won’t be unhappy and leave and your buzz rating will stay intact. Just remember to drag the doors back onto your walls once you’re ready to serve food again.
If you keep a close eye on your cafe and follow all of these instructions, you can be well on your way to maintaining a 105 buzz rating all the time. Happy cooking, chefs!
