More Awesome Than You!

I just realized that when you play an owned venue type business with the ticket machine, the price being charged are added to owner's fund, but not deducted from the customer's fund, even though there are minus dollar signs rising from the customers' heads. I want people to PAY, especially my playables, to get as close to a real economy in my hood as possible.  Other "free lunch": haircuts and bar drinks.  Probably coffee and massages too, although I haven't played a massage business yet.

Is anybody else bothered by this?

This annoys me too. I wondered if it was a bug in the game's code.

It could be that the rationale for the game working this way is that, if "real" money were charged to customers (including playables), sims would, at some point, run out of money and stop showing up at all.  It is likely easier to program that no real money is lost by customers, than it is to program sims not to completely bankrupt themselves. 

It would be more annoying to play a family with a business, and have all your other playables show up and spend all their "real" funds at the business.  In that scenario, when you went to play the other families you could find that they had no family funds left (due to standard sim unrestrained stupid behaviour) and were starving because they couldn't afford groceries.

Try installing "noplayableshoppers".  Your other playables won't show up at your business, but at least it won't be as noticeable that your business is earning money while nobody else is losing any.

The L&P for OFB stated that playable Sims would only spend 10% of available family funds, so as not to bankrupt themselves. It was also stated that purchased items could be deleted from inventories for a full refund (a myth which has been debunked). With a ticket machine, there is no physical product to return, which may be EA's rationale for not actually charging playables. It could be worse: imagine a scenario where Sims did stay in a ticket machine venue, spending 10% of available funds for each session. After several sessions with ticket machine lots, one could end up visiting a playable lot where the family funds had dropped to nine Simoleons (nine being the first integer not wholly divisible by ten or easily rounded in the game).

I specifically want playables to shop, so I leave out "noplayableshoppers". In fact, in my hood (my own version of apocalypse+build a city challenge), the military base is the only producer of goods and food so far.  Playables can only build or buy for the equivalent value of their purchased goods from the military shops, while the military factories procure raw materials (i.e., dig), manufacture goods (with crafting stations), and grow produce.  If they do not show up at the shops enough for a round of play, I have them pay 150% of the value of the goods for "special delivery".

I'm fine with them spending money for non-tangible goods, even if they empty their pockets. My sims can live on very little money, and I actually enjoy more playing poor sims than rich ones. I just can't stand money from nowhere.

If this is coded as such, maybe there is a way to change/mod it. Maybe some awesome one is able to find and mod the codes and make it happen.

If you want playables to shop, I suggest you put NPS in anyway, then use the Customer Selector. Otherwise you will chew up more CPU cycles keeping everything running, since the Customer Selector will need to run suppressive fire.

Okay, so it's a feature, not a bug. But if one wants to have a playables-only hood with a reasonably integrated economy, then it's a real problem. I need to test but I've noticed that a handful of my playables never come to the town's most popular (level 10) entertainment venue. Through observation, I've noted that these playables have pathetic 3-figure household accounts. I don't think this is a coincidence. As illusionofjoy pointed out, the 10% method wouldn't work. I need to test this, but I'm guessing the game has a safety threshold of 1000 simoleons or thereabouts. Edited to add: Preliminary testing shows that the value is about 500. I'd hope any hack that appropriately adjusted the playable sim's household account would reference this some way.

When making my lot income rights hack I did notice some code that specifically stops shopping deductions once a family has less than $20,000 or some number with a 2 in it.  That could probably be fixed to be $1 or something.

That's great Inge, I thought someone would come forward.  ;)

Very much so, yes. The entire OfB economy is utterly unuseable =/ just in case you haven't noticed, the employee wages are broken as well, probably for the same reasons (making the game easy for twelves). So be careful before you hire any playables, it could wreck havoc with your economy .. I think if you do a search for "emplyee double dipping" here, you'll find a few old threads about it. 

I think all this more has to do with the unusual way time itself is handled in TS2.

I'm aware of that. I used to use employeenodoubledip. But then Gwenke made a pretty useful "Pickable OfB employee schedules (http://simlogical.com/slforum/index.php?topic=2245.0)" at Inge's board, and it conflicts with nodoubledip. So without employeenodoubledip, I deduct any earnings employees bring home. But still their "wealth" data (accessible through Squinge/Lord Darcy date counter) is inflated by the double dipping.

With the help of cramyboy's community time project, we eliminated the "live twice" issue. Now, we need to make them PAY!

No, they still "live twice". Or three times. A sim "lives" a "day" as many times as there are famblies. For instance, for the ~30 days in an adult lifespan, if there are 30 families, a given day will "occur" 30 times, once for each of the 30 families in the game. This covers for the fact that a given day can be both abysmally short and interminably long, depending on whether you have anything to do on that day. As such, time is still "warped" in the sense that each bubble exists seperately.