More Awesome Than You!

Title says it all: I think my Reputation meter is borked.

I have this guy who is my business, land-grabbing mogul. He is nice though, has tons of best friends and very high business ranks for each business (9s and 10s).

Except... his reputation is in the red, in the menacing stage. I completely forgot about checking his reputation (who the fuck cares?) until I got a pop-up in the corner from a friend telling him that he's been hearing not-so good things about him and blah blah blah. I checked his reputation, and its nearly completely red.

I make friends by using Macrotastics > Socialize > Friendly when he's not busy selling. I thought he'd have a good reputation from being nice (as the description for the reputation meter says something about friendly interacts raise your reputation) and friendly. Is it hobby-related? I haven't really built up him hobbies, but he's a sports enthusiast, and occasionally plays catch with the random customer (after charging them by the hour, of course). Or is it due to the lack of time on his own property and socializing at home instead of on a business lot? I usually send him home to buy another lot and stuff, he's hardly home.

I don't think the problem is hack related at all, and it doesn't seem to be neighborhood-wide. I have a family where the matriarch is a housewife who enjoys cooking. She doesn't really go out much, she takes care of the house for her werewolf husband and tends to her twin children (I've got a storyline for this family, heh). Her reputation though is pretty high on the positive side (her cooking hobby is maxed out too), and she interacts with her family and walk-bys.

So I'm thinking reputation is built on your home lot and not on your business lots. Can anyone confirm or deny this theory? Has anyone else had problems with the reputation meter?

Actually unless you have Pescado's comm-skilling hack it is the opposite. Reputation can only be changed on community lots and not your home lot without it. Comm-skilling lets you gain reputation anywhere. But you are right if you are making friends it shouldn't be getting worse but better.

Reputation has some interesting quirks to it: Merely ATTEMPTING a social, even if it never actually fires, will affect your rep, so you can easily exploit it by picking invalid targets to attempt to socialize with, having it fail, and getting the repboost anyway even if the social never occurred. So if your sim attempts to shove someone, for instance, he loses rep even if he never actually manages to perform the action.

I have comm-skilling. The Sim in question has nice points and all the business perks for the relationship boosters. He's never initiated or attempted an unfriendly social, autonomously or directed. He's a nice, rich mogul who owns half of my neighborhood so far (a few of my playables work for him). He has no enemies, tons of friends. And the more he socializes, the more unpopular he gets. Urg.

ETA: Is it possible that Sales come off as negative socials for the sake of reputation? I don't think I have the "Salespeople don't get relationship boost" hack, but I'm wondering if that hack could fix the Sales socials coming as negative.

Sales socials do not appear to be flagged as negative, so that doesn't appear to be the case, but feel free to test empirically.

I don't remember what exactly I did or didn't do, but it appears to be acting correctly now. In fact, his reputation is maxed out to the positive now. Maybe just bitching about it fixes it.

I hate the reputation system and it nearly drove me nuts trying to work out why some get bad reps and others get good ones. The quieter sims seem to get bad reps just because they would rather read a book than chatter inanely.  I found that just stacking up lots of  "admires" soon takes them out of the red.