The bork pool for L&P Sims 2 "Free Time / Hobbies / Numpty Crap" EP7

[J. M. Pescado]

Easy fix: open %LATEST EP INSTALL DIRECTORY%/TSData/Overrides/HolidayNewYearsPartyFix.package (or something to that effect) in SimPE. Find the pie menu string for English_uk, and remove the ellipsis. Then retype the ellipsis. Save, and it should be fixed. You'll need to recopy the package for every future EP.

There's an even easier solution: Just remove the en_uk strings entirely, because they're simply a total waste of space, as EAxis doesn't actually USE them for anything except wasteful redundancy. It's not like they actually use British spelling in the UK stringset or anything.

[shallow_kid]

The new way to increase the chance of twins will be incredibly borked and cause everyone to spawn twins all the time.

[MrsH]

I am laying confident bets on any item containing "EA" in the title becoming the only thing ever to appear in the wants list.  Whatver these wants are, they will be worth minimal aspiration points.  They will be immediately rerolled on fulfillment.  World without end.  Pleasure sims will become even more of a pain in the bum than they already are.  "Play EA FIFA 2009", "Play MySims", "Play Spore", "Get in zone playing game" ...

Each game will take two sim hours to find and load.  No child will get to school on time because left to themselves for only seconds, they will be locked into a "go and get game from upstairs bedroom, whine for half a sim hour because someone else is using the only console they consider available, insert game, play game, have hysterics because of missed school" cycle.

Cars will collapse and die on use.  A car repairperson will be a new and useless NPC, spawning in gigantic quantities, along with "wild bohemian artists". 

The teddy bear construction kit is doomed.  Nobody will ever finish making a teddy bear, because every item in any given queue will be stomped by the passionate desire to "go and help make bear" for all sims on the lot.

Easels will be the new piano and will cease to work at all.  If they do work, they will have the draining abilities of green snapdragon smoke.

The more I think about this, the more I likely to give the whole thing a miss.

[MidnightVoyager]

Oh no.

I just realized.

What if they make the new creature Sim........ Social Bunnies?

[MadameUgly]

I'm in full agreement with:

*Binocular lag.  And of course they'll be obsessed with bird watching, making lagging constant (and birds will cause lag, a la the lady bug houses)

*Food issues.  Any new foods won't be able to be saved as leftovers.  I'll add that exisitng bakeries will need to replace all food as it will be reset and ruined (including food in inventories--which may cause further issues).

*Car issues.  Fixed ones will break, issues with calling/using repairman, etc

My predictions:

*Already created portraits/custom paintings will all reset to a maxis painting (probably the sunset).  There will be no way to fix it.

*The weird "pets" neighborhood thing will happen again.  You'll fire up the game to find your neighborhoods have been replaced by some strange new neighborhood template, which you won't be able to load or do anything with.  You'll have to a complete re-install to fix it.

*We'll get multiple pollinators again.  Like the time between Nightlife and Pets (if memory serves), all the products of abduction will not be related.  But existing alien sims will have major relationship/family tree issues that will never be completely fixed.

*Borked maxis made family in the bin (that's a given) a la the Auto-Mess family.  And they'll escape the bin all the time (and probably be hideously ugly--though I like hideously ugly).

[jolrei]

Any activity that advertises heavily (i.e. basketball court, teddy bear crafting, bird watching) that sims will do autonomously and constantly will take at least a sim-half-hour to cancel, a la sandcastle building.

[Jelenedra]

Or snowman building. I never understood why it takes three hours to stop building a snowman long enough to get a COAT on so the sim isn't in their UNDERWEAR.

[MidnightVoyager]

Dear god, I hate that. I had every damn one of my Sims freeze solid while that was happening.

Problem: I had used the weather machine to make the snow.

...

And it was still on. And there was nobody to turn it off.

I possessed the paper boy to turn it off and warm them up. x_X

[MrsH]

It's a fundamental rule of simming that any autonomous activity will be infuriating, time consuming and lethal.  For preference, EA seem to like it best when those activities add a stuck object or bugger up your portals.

There is no reason I can see to think this new EP will be any different.  It will just have added shiney numptitude.

[SilentDream]

I say that all this let's play Spore, and My Sims is propaganda and the only new game we get is that Don't Wake the Llama. BUT since games are one of the main points of this EP the advertising for SFX or whatever it is goes up making it impossible to have a computer in an accessible area.

The twins thing is a total lie. Wasn't there something about cookies that was supposed to improve twin odds but did nothing?


Though, I know this completely will not happen, I would love for them to bring the Artistic/Creative/Whatever it was called Aspiration from the ps2 Sims 2.

[SaraMK]

Though, I know this completely will not happen, I would love for them to bring the Artistic/Creative/Whatever it was called Aspiration from the ps2 Sims 2.

Yes, that would be good, and would make real sense, and would be very useful... which is why it won't happen, of course.

[Venusy]

The twins thing is a total lie. Wasn't there something about cookies that was supposed to improve twin odds but did nothing?

That was a rumour started around the time of TS2's release. Eventually, it got so well known that EA actually created a food which increased twin odds (cheesecake, introduced in OFB). However, due to buggy programming, it increased the odds to 100%. I have no doubts that the EP7 increase will either be the same as the cheesecake increase, or complete bullshit.

Any Sim with the bad luck to become a zombie vampire werewolf plantsim (insert EP7 weirdo here) will either constantly error due to a lack of foresight on how many layers a Sim should be able to display, or the skin colour will change randomly and generally look terrible.

[Lyra]

Smooth Talking will be broken. At best, it will be like normal conversations, at worst, it will be the inverse of what it was intended to be.

The 'Teeny Tikes Activity Table' will leave invisible blocks and crayoned pictures all over the lot. These will slow the lot down to a crawl and will need to be nuked ala Kicky Bags.

[J. M. Pescado]

Or snowman building. I never understood why it takes three hours to stop building a snowman long enough to get a COAT on so the sim isn't in their UNDERWEAR.

Well, first, activities involving long animations with no abort points inherently has this extreme difficulty in aborting it. Second, coats don't do jack. All the snow interactions inflict cold damage independently of a sim's uniform, so it doesn't really matter whether they're building snowmen dressed in a coat vs. a bikini.

[MrsH]

I am a numpty - give me my £5. 

Is this true only of snow related activities?  If I make a sim chat for hours to a neighbour wearing a coat will he chill slower than if he chats for hours in his underwear?

If not, my entire household is going into swimsuits for the whole year, which is what they seem to want to do most days anyway.

[MidnightVoyager]

Second, coats don't do jack. All the snow interactions inflict cold damage independently of a sim's uniform, so it doesn't really matter whether they're building snowmen dressed in a coat vs. a bikini.

Which is WILDLY STUPID *augh*

[Liveangel]

Temperature queries are awsered in http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,7656.0.html
I'll take "Cars will break down frequently" a step futher. Said cars will be impossible to fix - i.e. car-fixing will be borked and will literally take forever to fix.

I know someting like this has been said before, but your Sims aspirations will now be stomped by two 500 AP wants: buy crap and use crap! Autonomous actions will revolve around use crap. No more asylum challenges, because your Sims will be too busy using new skilling machines to eat, sleep, or use the terlet.

I'm starting to think EA is a bunch of furries.

Starting? Think? With Social Bunnines in the base game, Mascots in Uni, and the Gorilla Costume in OFB, I'm suprised you'd admit to not knowing so since a long time ago.

[J. M. Pescado]

Is this true only of snow related activities?  If I make a sim chat for hours to a neighbour wearing a coat will he chill slower than if he chats for hours in his underwear?

The difference is not statistically significant. Coats have no effect on chilling. Sims suffer no real cold penalties as long as outdoor temperature is not lower than like -70 and cannot freeze except by cold-inducing actions.

[Jelenedra]

So, as long as you don't build snowmen or snow angels, your sims can dance around in their skivvies until the cows come home and never freeze? I had a sim that refused to go inside and get her coat on to garden and she turned all blue.

[J. M. Pescado]

So, as long as you don't build snowmen or snow angels, your sims can dance around in their skivvies until the cows come home and never freeze? I had a sim that refused to go inside and get her coat on to garden and she turned all blue.

It depends on temperature: If temperature is > -70, then yes. If temperature is -70 or worse, then they will freeze regardless of what you do and outerwear has no meaningful effect.

[Jelenedra]

Okay, then I won't worry about their gardening in their pjs anymore then.

BTW, I finally saw the trailer for this. I want because of the violins.

[MidnightVoyager]

The violins will break strings at the beginning of every playing session, if a Sim has no experience with them. This will make it impossible to learn to play the violin.

[Jelenedra]

At least their mechanical skill will go up, constantly repairing the strings.

[Aner-Dyfan]

No because that will also be broken, won't increase mechanical skill whatsoever and also borked so that if it fails to repair is will be destroyed and end up a pile of rubbish. However even a 10mechanical will not be able to repair it without a 80% failure rate.

[MidnightVoyager]

Specialized Instrument Repairmen will also spawn a new one every time you need them to repair an instrument, flooding your NPC pool. And don't forget the invisible "broken violin" objects everywhere!