More Awesome Than You!

Here are some interesting learnings deciphered thus far:

I. LTA Milestones
You receive an LTA point for achieving each of the following milestones:
0x01: Have/Adopt Child
0x02: Best Friend
0x03: Marry/Join
0x04: First Kiss
0x05: First WooHoo
0x06: Housebroken
0x07: Walked
0x08: Talked
0x09: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x0A: Become Adult
0x0B: Graduate
0x0C: Max Career
0x0D: Max Enthusiasm
0x0E: LTW
0x0F: ?? Appears Unused ??
0x10: Max Business
0x11: Wish Peace

Milestones may only be achieved once, repeats do not appear to help. CAS and pre-FT sims receive, by age:
Baby/Toddler: 0
Child: 2
Teen: 3
Adult: 5
Elder: 6

As a rule, pre-FT adults and elders get severely ripped off, and possibly teens also.

What is "Wish Peace"? Is that something to do with the genie?

That is how it would appear. I have no information regarding the genie at this time.

You can wish for peace of mind. I assume this is what that means.

wish for peace is the same as gaining permaplat...

Is a point awarded for obtaining all of the BV mementos?

No. The only milestones listed are above. Some milestones appear not to give an LTA point, like the Toddler milestones give nothing individually, it seems you need them all to gain a point.

Prima Guide Lies:

To completely fill the meter you need 30,000 points

You get the points for the following events,
Adopt/Give Birth(1200)
Level 10 Buisiness(1200)
Savvy Traveller Memento Moniker(900)
Fall in love(1200)
First Kiss(1200)
First Woohoo(1500)
Get Married/Joined(1200)
Graduate From College(1200)
Graduate From High School(600)
Level 10 Career(1200)
Level 10 Hobby(900)
Satisfy Lifetime Want(1200)
Potty Trained(600)
Learn To Walk(600)
Learn to Talk(600)
Learned Nursery Rhyme(600).

Points are also added from the daily aspiration every hour ( or subtracted if they are in the red)
Toddlers get between -42 and 81 per hour
Children get between -21 and 40 per hour
Teens get between -14 and 26 per hour
Young Adults get between -2 and 4 per hour
Adults get between -10 and 20 per hour
Elders get between -14 and 26 per hour

The scoring rate for Young Adults is lower so Uni sims do not have too much of an advantage over sims that do not go to uni.

What is involved in "Graduate from high school"? Do they need to get a certain grade? If not it seems a bit of a cop out as it would happen unavoidably and at the same time as "become adult"

I think it means the same thing as Become Adult, only worded in some kind of sappy pro-12 way.

So what is it with the weekly, "Oh I had a great week!" pop-ups? How are those measured and what is their worth?

So, First Woohoo is the top-scoring achievement, and it beats such things as graduating from college, satisfying one's lifetime want, and reaching the top of the career track.  Can you say "Programmed by people who don't have a life?" :-)

Ok, really. If you had a choice between spending four years of time working and a whole lot of money for a piece of paper, becoming a mindless drone only good for looking after grandchildren, doing the daily grind-and-suck-up dance, or getting it on, which would you choose?

Getting it on! :D

Maybe because such a fuss is made of your first 'woohoo'... because woohoo is such a bad thing.  ::)

All the Prima Guide info can be considered not-true, as it is clear that the "Nursery Rhyme" milestone does not exist. That similarly renders all of the other information obvious fabrication.

I'm not denying the essential preferability of woohoo to much of the rest of life, just saying that it's not much of an ACHIEVEMENT.

I wouldn't say that... I know people for whom even getting touched would be an achievement ;).

Like, say, EAxis programmers?  ::)

And that was my original point -- that this rating scheme seems to have been set up by people who aren't getting enough. :-)

Obviously :D - I've noticed that romance power wants (2 loves, woohoo 5 etc.) seem to fill up the meter pretty fast, though they're not listed above.

what about the maxing of ones Skillzzz

Either it is not working right in my game or it functions differently than it is described. Anyway, one of my sims trained a toddler with Freetime installed and the toddler got two LTA points, apparently for learning to walk and for the potty training.
Now I just had a student having his first woohoo but he got no LTA point for that. Generally the students got 4 points, but I noticed that some that had a gold or platinum aspiration level already have 5 points and he was one of them. The same is true for some of my teenagers and one child, they got an extra point, apparently because of their aspiration level.
So it seems that instead of getting a point for a milestone, the milestone tends to push the meter above a certain limit. Looking at some of the scores, more than 9000 points equal five LTA points, but to get to six the sim needs a score higher than 13000 (?, I was judging from the only elder, Mortimer), which would explain why the student did not get a LTA point.
Thinking about it, it would make more sense that way. Take a romance sim with a fear to get married, force him or her through it (and into aspiration failure) it should theoretically be possible to balance out the milestone effect, which would be more plausible than to award a LTA point to a sim with a nervous breakdown.

Has anyone actually managed to get a Perma-Plat sim since FreeTime?

Yes.  Post FT installed, newly-Permaplat sims appear to function normally.

My experience as well.  Permaplat as adult - now an elder and still chugging along fine on platinum aspiration.

Pre-FT adults really get screwed. I have a child who has full Lifetime Aspiration + perma plat. I like now that there's an alternative to doing the lifetime want if you want perma plat (legitimately).

I believe the matchmaker gives you the genie lamp after one of your sims have had a full lifetime aspiration meter for a while. You get 3 wishes per lamp, anyone in the house can make a wish. After that lamp is gone, you can get receive another one for the accomplishments of one of your other sims (thats how I understand from my experience at least.)

Not true in my game.  Several of my sims have received a lamp, and none of these sims have had a full LTA meter.

Ugh.  Does that mean you have to un-ban the gypsy if you have her banned with the visitor controller?

I had an infant receive a lamp last night - it was her very first memory.

(http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/gynarchy/genie_lamp.jpg)


She was banned from my lot and was still able to drop off the lamp.

Definitely seems like maxing out the LTA bar or getting permanent peace from a lamp is much easier than the (already too easy) LTW.  Especially if you can get the lamp as a toddler.

The rumours I heard before FT was released had me hoping that getting perma plat would be harder.  Instead it's now ridiculously easy.

It really seems like this EP panders to the BBSers.  Those who had trouble getting twins (even after OFB guaranteed them), who thought LTWs were hard, and who wanted alien babies but didn't know how to download a hack to make abductions easier.  No wonder the promo videos talked about fans - the fans on the BBS are who this EP is aimed at, it is definitely not aimed at the gamers who enjoy the game.

How is this possible? A child only has 8 days to live. In order to get full LTA, even at 100 LTA per hour (the actual value is probably much lower), you would only earn 19200 LTA over the child stage, and it requires some 30K to fill, and that assumes constant platinum all the time AND that the rate is that high. The exact rate is probably lower. To get full LTA, you'd have to have cheated already.

Does that include toddler events like maxing skills, being potty trained, et cetera?

The point yield on those is not on the same order of magnitude and can be ignored as negligible for this estimate.

oh, right, they give you those trade-in-able points. My bad.

I also had the toddler get the lamp -- largish screenshot in the 'Lifetime Membership Indeed!' thread -- and was able to get the toddler's older brother, a child, to wish for peace of mind. Though I know that's not perma-plat in the lifetime bar, I've only had that for one adult sim so far. (Haven't really played that much recently)

Seemed a bit odd to even get that far with the lamp, but I suspect that's just EAxis at work. It wasn't throwing any errors at me, at least.

They don't get the benefit/LTA points independent of the lifetime meter score. Based on the information from the Prima Guide which Tigerlilley gave (which has some errors, but the hourly rates seem to be correct), a toddler on constant platinum could get a maximum of approx. 7700 points from it. As a baby (no best friend required) they get an initial bonus of 1800 points. So it works like that:

1800 points as a baby + 600 from the first skill learned = 2400. For a lifetime meter score of more than 2000 they get 2 benefit points.
Learning the other two skills will add 1200 points to that score, which means that it brings it up to 3600 points if they don't gain anything for their mood and means they don't get another LTA point because they need a lifetime meter score of 4000 for that. One child in my game which grew into a toddler last night and was trained on all skills and on constant platinum after learning the first skill, has reached a score of 5000 on its first day in that lifestage (ca. 20 hours) and has 3 points.
Toddlers close to grow up and with all skills when Freetime is installed are actually getting the worst deal because they don't start with any points, not even the bonus for birth. Generally the period from birth to reaching school age seems to give you a massive lifetime meter increase.
Children on constant platinum could add another 6700 points, so its not enough to completely fill the lifetime meter. As teenagers they could get 8700 points maximum, adults 13400.

From 6000 points, which give you 4 LTA points every increase of 3000 adds one LTA point, so you get 5 for a score of over 9000. If the sim has a miserable life and has always been on the edge of aspiration failure not even the first woohoo can save him since it doesn't bring him up to the necessary 12000 points.
The hourly addition of points apparently carries on during holidays and on community lots, which could make leaving the house a big lifetime meter booster, especially if a sim heads from one dream date to the next.

What I haven't completely worked out are the milestones. Learning the nursery rhyme definitely does not give extra points, but you don't seem to get anything for the best friend either (which usually happens when they are babies and they all have the same initial 1800 points), so I tend to believe that the information from the Prima Guide is correct there and you get the points for the first love.

Lamp theory: (Note, I have nothing to back this up)

Could the lamp be gained because of the points of the family as a whole? Possibly delivered to the youngest member, as it may not be possible to get another until the first sim that got it is no longer around?

Or is it simply random, as I first thought?

No, I don't think it's based on family points.  Chester Gieke just got one on his second day played.  He is still a "shoddy schlub" on the LTA meter and lives alone.

Simply Sadorandom is my guess.

The Nursery Rhyme most certainly is NOT a listed landmark and has no known trigger. Uncertain about the best-friend part. I will re-read that section sometime.

I spawned the lamp from the mailbox in debug mode a while back, out of a combination of curiosity and storytelling requirements. I'm fairly sure I used an adult to do it - most likely the Sim I wanted to use it - yet the youngest Sim in the household, a toddler at the time, got the memory. Faizah may be onto something.

Yes ,I have a pre-free time sim that was at Sim State University  when I installed free time she is a popularity sim who lives with her sister and brother in law both pre free time born in game sims .Since the three returned from uni and set up a house hold Lexie has acheived Perma Plat and  3 LTW's,Aden has achieved LTW and Perma-Plat ,Tiffany  was the last  to acheive Perma-Plat and her LTW .To be fair however Tiffany had her LTW put on hold to accomodate her marriage to Aden and the pregnancy and birth of twin boys. getting a sim to go perma plat depends on the LTW and whether the sim has been to Uni  or not .Career LTW's are easiest to acheive .

Funny you should say that. It may be coincidence, sadorandom, etc, but, once the toddler grew up a couple of times, I packed him off to uni and played a couple of semesters. As soon as I returned to the home lot, the family got another lamp, and youngest sim on the lot got the lamp memory. Further supporting the 'youngest sim gets it, rendering the family not eligible until they leave' hypothesis. I find myself wondering, now, if 'death' counts as leaving...

On an unrelated topic, it seems that hitting the top of the teen career counts as 'Max Career' in terms of lifetime aspiration. (Which I presume was done this way for the pre-FT elders?)

Easiest LTWs to achieve is the "Earn 100K" LTW. It can be done in a matter of seconds with no effort whatsoever, and all you need is a bit of seed cash (does not need to be 100K, but the more you have, the faster). Without blatant exploitation, the next one would probably be "Max All Skills" followed by "20 Best Friends", both of which can easily be done as teens. 50 First Dates works if you just do the date-and-run, otherwise it's just plain crazy. 50 Dream Dates is somewhere on the score of tedium next to "200 Grilled Cheese", but at least that one was never meant to be serious.

i was wondering how my sim became permaplat and max her aspiration benefit...i thought it is only filled by the milestone! my fave sim is a teen and she's too young to become a permaplat...she doesn't even fulfill her LTW *sobs* i like keeping her bar to platinum, and didn't notice that she keeps gaining the aspiration benefits...there is no way to remove the benefit point, isn't it? :(

It is likely that the lucky recipient of the memory will simply be the sim with the lowest object instance on the lot, similar to "The One". This will largely appear sadorandom on old lots, given that the object ID is not displayed as a visible characteristic.

Okay, with FT, if a sim achieves his LTW, will they become permaplat, or do they need to max out their lifetime aspiration as well (or are they mutally exclusive so a sim can become permaplat as LTA, and ignore LTW)

Let's fix that
Are the ways of getting permaplat able to be done by:
Wishing on the genie
Getting your LTW
Filling the LTA bar

What happens if you do the rest after getting permaplat anyways

"Wish for peace" and fulfilling a lifetime want BOTH make you permaplat.  Maxing your Long-term asp bar, I don't know about.  But now there are TWO ways to permaplat your sims.

Maxing the LTA bar grants perma-plat status as well.

I'm pretty sure that the option to wish for peace was not available when my elder sim got his lamp from the genie.  Mind you, he was permaplat already, so perhaps it is only available to non-permaplat sims.

I have only had 'Wish for Peace of Mind' show for sims that aren't yet perma-plat, seems to be as designed. (They don't really need it if they've already got it)

So what are the options and results with the genie lamp? Has anyone tested all of them yet?

I realize I'm a month behind on this and everyone probably already knows these, but the options for the genie are:

Wish for wealth: Huge bag of money drops for $10k...also, it seems there's a way to get him to drop $30k at once by wishing it repeatedly.
Wish for Piece(sic) of Mind:  Perma-plat...nice job on the typo, EAxis
Wish for a way to Cheat Death: Can plead reaper for own life
Wish for Long Life: Same as Elixir of Life.
Wish for Beauty: Temporary attraction boost.

Largely unimpressive, although the Cheat death could be interesting, but the rest is basically worthless.  Hopefully someone will come up with a hack to make it more better.  Also, the lack of evil wishes is disappointing.

Cheat Death is very interesting. Does anyone know the odds on this?

I had a sim do that, just to see what it does. He then reached death by old age, and pleaded with death similarly to how they plead for a loved one. Death played "Find the Shiny" with him (had some glowing ball in a hand, switched it around behind his back, and the sim chose a hand). So far, my sim has won six times.

I agree, it would be nice to have a Wish Death On... one, or something of the sort.

WANT!

the first day its 100% guaranteed they will cheat death and each day after that the odds are supposed to drop by 10%

this is one of those times that I wish either I knew how to read the package files, or that this game was coded in c so I could mod it myself.

I have every reason to believe the game *IS* coded in C based on some of the errors it spits out, but normally, you don't get to mess with the source of the game itself. As for reading packages, this and MTS2 are pretty much the best places to learn this.

I generally work better with source code than with GUIs...dunno why...maybe from growing up with DOS and BASIC..

guess when I get some time to kill, I'll hunt down some tutorials on this stuff.

What are the negative results? Or are these even possible anymore?

I wonder why they didn't include some of the old wishes and their negative results. The multiple fires was kind of funny.

Some of the wishes carry an innate negative result. The beauty wish gives you constant stalkers, the wealth wish increases your chance of a burglar. Others are their own negative results!

Interestingly, I just had a lamp delivered last night to a sim who was the third youngest in the family. A child with twin toddler brothers. The first time I had a lamp delivered it was to the youngest. Now, the toddlers should have lower Object IDs than the child, shouldn't they? Or am I thinking from the wrong angle?

Yeah, I hate those GUI-things also. That's pretty much why Awesomeware code is laid out like it was written line-by-line instead of the tangled arrow-spaghetti that EAxis code favors. You'll notice how all Awesomeware carries a strong preference towards top-to-bottom consecutive flow.

The money from the wealth wish will keep dropping for a bit, but you have to clear your sim's queue to let it drop.

I noticed that-but if you have power idle on they disappear before your sim can pick it up.

That bug is fixed in an Undiscovered Shiny.

Gwill? Time to shake your maracas honey! ;D

/me junps up and down
Money shiney!

Wish for a way to Cheat Death: Can plead reaper for own life

At least this could come in handy for those deathwishing Knowledges (those with no LTWsanity, at any rate) who insist on rolling "Cheat Death" while they live alone. What a ridiculous waste of a Want slot that was.  ::)

I must admit I haven't seen this genie lamp in game yet, except for the family which comes with one (and I deleted them because I wanted to get the lamp on my own).  And I have played a few families for several Sim days, and even got some Sims quite high on the hobby interest bar, only I haven't maxed any of them out yet.  Could it be because I don't have NL installed at the moment, and thus perhaps don't have a gypsy matchmaker?  I'm running base game + UNI + SNS + FT at the moment, and had but got rid of TJ's Visitor Control mod after reading that it was incompatible with other FT functions.

[/asking_dumb_questions]

jwaas: The gypsy matchmaker, IIRC, is one of the, ahem, "features carried forward" when you install a later EP. This is by no means a guarantee, but in my game, Gypsy Matchmaker tends to drop a lamp off on my sim's doorstep after at least one out of every two sims in the household has two hobby interests above 8. I also have my sims skill like crazy the first couple of days, via Marcotastics (Thank You JM for that GEM of a hack!!!), and the first two skills I insist on are cooking and cleaning. I wait to stand corrected if anyone more Awesome than I knows anything different, though.

Aha, that's what I was hoping -- that it was a Feature Carried Forward.  I haven't skilled (hobbied?) any Sims quite up to that level, so I'll wait and see.  Thanks for the help!  :)

Actually, according to the Prima Guide, your chances of getting the Genie are slim but can be increased:

Well, the genie lamp/gypsy matchmaker saga continues.  I finally saw the gypsy for the first time in this context -- she snuck up to my Sims' house extremely conspicuously, in broad daylight, up the stairs onto their front porch -- and then disappeared!  I assume she was intending to drop off the lamp, but something conflicted and she went to Sim Limbo.  I've just installed a bunch of hacks from this site, so my guess is it's either an older unsupported hack, or a conflict with something non-awesome.

The Sims themselves shouldn't matter, but just in case, it was Andrew Martin who came with SNS, with his son Jacob off at Uni and his new wife Barbara in the house also, a former townie who is very pregnant with Jacob's first half-sibling.  And I think Peter Sims was visiting them at the time.  I'll start looking more closely at my Downloads folder, but I'm open to other suggestions.

I call tight pants. 

not that I know anything about that   ::)

Suggestions, that is, about what to look for in my Downloads folder that might be conflicting with the gypsy.  Suggestions for my wardrobe could probably only improve matters too, but not related to this situation.  ;D

Tight pants is the use of works of the NonAwesome or using outdated/obsolete Awesomeware

Oh, thank goodness.  Me in tight pants is something no one wants to see!  :P

I have removed a number of non-awesome and formerly-awesome hacks, and we'll see if the gypsy ever shows up now....

Perhaps you have an older version of TwoJeffs' Visitor Controller -- the VC by default zaps the Gypsy, but the latest version lets her deliver the lamp.  Check to make sure you have it.

Actually, I never saw the gypsy at all until I got rid of that older version of the VC.  Now that it's gone, I saw the gypsy that one time, but she disappeared before she could deliver the lamp.  I may go look for the latest version as you suggest anyway, since I liked using it in Uni to keep away cow mascots, professors, streakers, and other useless personages.  Of course I'll have to be sure to Allow Gypsy, if I do install it!  The problem is, as previously stated, the appearance of the gypsy is so rare that it will be a while before I even get an opportunity to see her again.  I'll let you guys know once I know anything more.  Isn't hunting down conflicts fun?  ::)

(I wonder if that's it -- could the older VC have made any permanent changes in the code?  Because the default was "Ban Gypsy" if I recall correctly.  It may take the new VC to change it back if so.)

On a totally different subject, just yesterday I experienced my first gnome-stealing, only to have the family's teen boy leave autonomously in the middle of the night to Steal Back the gnome.  He would have made the entire trip in his PJs if Inge's clothes-changing door had let him.  He succeeded in stealing it back, though I suppose there was a certain percentage chance that he'd have been brought home in the police car!  I can't get over how many things I still see that are completely new to me, even from the base game (as I suppose this was), even with all the hundreds of hours I've played it.

And now back to our currently scheduled expansion pack.  ;)

Even if the Gypsy is banned using the VC she will show up with the lamp. As soon as she has dropped it she will be zapped off lot.

That is really irrelevant to our interests here. And death to Emma.