More Awesome Than You!

Every since I installed OFB and FFS my sims have been attacking the bar like last call is in 5 min. They will make drinks and drink all 5 of them and make more and drink them too. On and on, they won't stop unless bladder desperation hits them then they go right back to it. Nothing else tempts them. This only happens on Residetial lots, not community. Did Maxis raise their attraction to sims? Whatever it is it gets annoying as heck . I'm to the point where I won't even put a bar in the house.

Can't say I've seen it. My sims don't seem to show any interest in drinking at bars.

I never put bars in my houses, as they never match the decor, so I cannot say.

I had the same problem.
I like having a bar for parties and headmasters, but I want my sims to keep the heck away from it.  I did find a non-awesome hack that keeps sims from making drinks autonomously, but they still come running to drink if someone makes drinks for them.
I mostly keep my sims on power idle these days, so it's not killing me as much as it used to.

Yeah, same here. They are unduly attracted to the bar and keep on drinking until they almost pee on themselves. I had to take the bar out of all my houses, which were mostly uni-houses. The students had no interest in anything but the bar. It was intermittently though. They make drinks, they and their roomies drink themselves into bladder desperation, and it contiunes on. Then they do something else and ignore the bar entirely for quite a few sim-days. Then the drinking cycle starts again. I came to the conclusion that they were all binge-drinkers with severe psychological disturbances that result in psychotic occurrences which then get a temporary relief through mind-altering substances.

I swear that everytime there's a stop-autonomous (insert annoyance here) hack sims find a new attraction to something to annoy everyone even more.  :D

Well... That just makes sense. If you eliminate all other possible options, the remainder, no matter how illogical is in veriably true?

(I know I spelled most of those words wrong...)

I've found that certain bars seem to have higher attraction meters than other or something...I know there are some that I've had to take out...if I replace them with a different one the attaction to them don't seem as high.

So yes..I've had the issue in some of my houses.  One of my elders would get up in the morning...drink until he was exhausted (peed himself around the bar...apparently the bar was still more attractive than taking a shower)...finally he'd go to bed...rinse & repeat.

My sims have also become lushes since OFB. This may explain why I keep handing out drinks in Retardo Land  ;) .

My best solution: put the bar in an inventory until you want them to use it.

The only reason I ever buy bars is if a sim Wants one, so I place it so that the back (or is it the front?  whichever side they get the drinks from) is against a wall.  That way they won't Want it again but can't turn into alcoholics.  Sometimes I'll move it to where it can be used if there's a party or something, but as soon as it's over, back it goes.

That's because the sims will have to do SOMETHING, so if you remove their ability to do one annoying action, they'll find a new one to do.

Trying to enforce correct behavior by removing the incorrect options means you're gonna have a LOT of removing to do. If you want them to do only correct behaviors, go with Macro Power Idle.

Even the servo Poll Tech#9 made was a lush in my game
 :D
This sounds like my parents  ;D When we would take our toddlers to visit they would turn their bookcases to the wall so my kiddies couldn't touch their precious collection......Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia not first folio Shakespear  :D

I think the autonomous actions of townies are more annoying especially the autonomous 'point and laugh at the one idiot townie dancing on the dance floor' since OFB the amount of people on my lots has increased so the amount of people crowding round to point and laugh at the same time has increased.
Funny the first time seeing the whole gang of them laughing but after half hour of NPC's stopping to take an order/serve dinner to laugh gets old fast especially with the date timer going down.   ::)

I find it appropriate for Popularity, Pleasure and Romance Sims to be using the bar when they want one, but I'm not really sure why a Knowledge/Family/Fortune (well, Fortune is borderline) would use the bar religiously.  Then again, they don't really want a bar as much as the other three aspirations do...I guess it's also a personality quirk too...who knows *shrug*  ???

There's a lesson: Don't make the dance area observable from the dining areas. Although the townies will eventually learn how to dance and stop looking stupid, so it will pass in time.

This behaviour was one of the reasons that I uninstalled OFB expansion pack. It seems that the programmers made the main preference - the bar/coffee stand  objects, no matter where are the sims - in a community lot, or at home. If they see a bar or a coffee stand - they don't move from there, drinking all the time, and ignoring all the other entertaiment objects, even the Myshuno. You have to delete the bar/coffee stand, if you don't want them to be obssessed by it.

It's a bug, and should be fixed in a patch.

....it is. See "restaurant and bar fix" in the Firing Range.

I haven't actually seen sims obsess over the bars on a community lot. Which is immensely vexing when you're trying to run a bar, and everyone would rather stare at their own navels instead.

Mine even missed the car pool one time because he was busy drinking.

That is hilarious. However I found the hack by Squinge at MTS2- no autonomous drinking or something like that. I haven't had chance to test it yet. But I'll let you know how it works.

Advertising is completely arbitrary and set by Maxis, generally with a total disregard for what's effective. Hence why free will never makes a correct decision.

I've seen them obsess over a bar I put in a regular community lot (i.e., a quick mart type store), and ignore the bar in an actual bar or restaurant one of my sims is running.  Very odd.

I know that it would all be a moot point/complaint if I turned 'free will' off, but I can't stand them standing around, completely struck by inertia. I find their anticts (pardon the pun) often comical. Many objects seem to have an attraction setting that has the simmies behave like semi-rational pixel people, but there are a few that go quite overboard. Hence, I can't use fish-tanks (TJ's fix stopped working for me since OFB, sigh), bars, karaoke machines, and a few other things that I can't remember right now.

I don't remember who made it, because I had it for so long, but I use the 'individual free will off' on my residential lots. On my sim-owned business lots, I turn free will off completely though. After seeing the supposed 'business owners' do the most idiotic things instead of concentrating on their customers, I decided that free will was the worst thing for a business. They did everything from pissing off their customers, to 'checking out' other sims, and even dancing with their significant others and ignoring their customers as well as the line at the cash register. I had one sim (with 4 nice points???) constantly trying to hug complete strangers that came into the shop, and managed to get the minus signs flying among his potential customers. He didn't seem at all fazed by the constant rejection.

Sims are incapable of performing any action that has a purpose under free will. Anything they might accomplish is purely incidental. If you expect them to accomplish a complex OBJECTIVE, like, "running a business", this is never going to happen because sims don't understand purposes or objectives. Your two choices: Manually micromanage everything, or install an overlay AI module like Macrotastics + BRY. And micromanagement is not an option for employees: The employees, not able to understand the concept of an objective, will work until something drops low enough to interrupt work, and then not able to understand the objective of refreshing themselves and getting back to work, so they won't do it.

I was a little surprised about the sims behavior when I did the (modified) asylum challenge I read about at Posie's place. Yeah, I installed a smoke alarm, an extra toilet and shower, and multiple easels.

* I'm not good at sticking to other peoples rules if I deem them inadequate for my purposes, so sue me.*

Except for the constant crying because of aspiration distress, they took remarkable care of themselves. They did pass out a few times, but none starved to death. They were mostly in the green in their little thumbnail picture. I wasn't allowed to look at their panels so I can't say what need was the most neglected, but their side-panel picture was green or green-ish the majority of the time.

The ones that went into outright aspiration failure first were the fortune sims. They are completey incabable of taking care of their aspiration wants on their own. The ones that never went into outright failure were the knowledge sims. Their primary want of learning skills prevented that through the easels and the exercise machine.

The popularity sims and romance sims went into distress often, but not into failure. I'm guessing they were kept afloat with the 'talk, flirt, dance together' wants that rolled up after the more complicated wants were never fulfilled. I don't allow family sims in my game (personal choice, no offense to family sims fans), so I can't say anything about them and their wants, but I'm guessing they would be as hapless as the poor fortune sims.

That all might have been incidental, or co-incidental, or whatever, but I was surprised that they managed to take care of their pixel-selves like that. The hardest part for me was the 'hands-off, no peeking'.

Can't live without that mod. It's  Here (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=143401) for anyone who is interested. Works a charm. :)

Interesting thing about free will in TS2, FBA() uses the following priorities:

Fun, Social, Comfort, then Hunger, Bladder, Energy

The game weights these slightly according to the sim's personality and the advertising of various available objects, but it mostly fulfills the Fun need first. This is why things like dishes and ringing phones advertise Fun. It's also why sims are obsessed with Fun objects, because it makes sims more fun to watch unless you actually play the game in a serious way. Serious Sims 2 players really should turn off free will.

I think the radio button was labelled 'Free Will' by mistake.  It should have read 'Flirt with anything that has two legs, run around the house looking at all the new stuff, and leave the dinner in the oven to watch the TV.'

Of course, that would have taken up too much space but I'm sure there's something which summarises such behaviour in two words (or less).

How about "Idiot Mode"?

See, that's incorrect behavior. But I bet I could tweak it to work better. What it SHOULD be is that Bladder should be dealt with first below about 0, then Energy below -95, Hunger below -80s below about -85, then Hunger below -50, and then FINALLY fun. Energy should be completely IGNORED below -70, and very little attention should be paid to hunger at all until 0.

The thing to realize about all this is that FBA() is the last check you do right before the postprocessing of free will. A ton of other checks precede it.

The real problem with the needs system is that Bladder, Hunger, and Energy are specific types of Comfort, and Fun, Social, and Environment are derivatives of intuitive Comfort. Comfort itself is really just a catch-all miscellaneous term. In short, the system is not very well organized, and is prone to confusion.

The Needs system should be completely phased out and replaced with some type of Nature/Memory system.

I don't think those checks are relevant to why sims are stupid, though, they cover other things like unplugging them from animations, and timing.

The other thing to note about Free Will is that Free Will is not actually intended as a mode of play! You will note there is an extended, rather lengthy "cooldown wait" before it fires, meaning it is intended to be an idle-behavior, not a primary mode of play. It lacks sufficient aggression for that, and is thus prone to deadly stunlocking.

Well, as far as the motives go, it's a crude attempt to emulate basic human motivations which runs a little thin around the edges. Such as that people strictly don't require "Fun" so much as they require non-Boredom, and that if people are too bored, it is actually possible to die of boredom when your brain shuts down from disuse. "Environment" is just a motive to make people not give sims crappy houses, and as far as sims motives go, it's pretty unimportant, rather like how it is in real life. It's also very much a matter of opinion, rather than a universally-agreed upon attribute, like it in the Sims. Sims ALL like the same kind of environment, which is not true of real people. I consider a badly lit, bare concrete room to be an excellent environment, my preferred environment of choice, and would despise a room filled with bright light and windows, and have a complete indifference to any number of paintings hung on walls. I am not easily bothered by the environment as such, having rather minimalistic tastes, so something that would make *MY* environment bar green might be an awful place for someone else.

I noticed that one stops all autonomous drinking. Squinge also has another one called Less Attractive Drinks. I haven't tried it as I keep forgetting to but a bar in the house, but might be a good alternative to stopping their behavior cold turkey.

The thing that really makes sims stupid is their inability to remember what they were doing before they got interrupted.  I realize it could get out of hand with interruptions on top of interruptions on top of interruptions, but would it have been that hard to give them one level of recall?

Of course, if they had, I guess we would all be bitching about how sims couldn't remember two things.

If they could just hold a thought in their tiny brains for a few seconds longer, that would be an immense help. I hate that they forget to go up the stairs just because someone else was using them, for instance. Or forget to interact with another Sim because said Sim had to put away a book before the interaction. I want what I tell them to do not to disappear from the queue so readily.

It's not really the concept of "holding a thought" as in something inherent to the game. Each and every action has a defined "timeout" period individual to that action or group of actions, and thus how quickly an action times out when it can't be initially completed the first time varies greatly. Experiments with "no timeout" have been used in the past, where I order an action to succeed or die trying, but then people complain when their sim can't do the action for some reason, but refuses to give up because I have not allowed them to fail the attempt, only to succeed or die trying.

Is there any way to lengthen the timeout period, or is it a binary thing?

Theoretically possible, but it may have to be done on a per-action basis, which means there are a lot of things.

Hmm, your Macrotastic command of "concentrate" works pretty well though. I realise that it's not feasble to use it everytime you give commands not connected to macrotastic, it would require a lot of extra clicking, and us non-serious, free-will on gamers would have to do some extra sim chasing or pausing, but if I want to queue up more than 3 or 4 commands, I always use it. It's been working as advertised so far.

I'm kind of having the same problem here.  I've had a total of four weddings so far and in all of them the couples did not get into the limo as intented.  They stand in front of the limo like they are going to sit inside (which is a mere 2 seconds or so) then they run off to the bar to get a drink :/  They miss the limo.

The last wedding I did, I saved right before they run to the limo, deleted the bar to see if it would make a difference, but only one got in and the other ran to the bartender to "get a drink". 

I don't know if it's a hack causing this.  I doubt it though cos the only hacks I use are from JM and TJ, and a few from Inge.

Inability to board a vehicle is addressed in an experimental fix for a problem that occurred as of OFBp2. Get it and your sims will probably be more able to board a vehicle.

I wasn't aware that there is a fix for it, will download asap J.M :)

I find this most annoying when you command a parent to teach a toddler something and the toddler to quit playing to receive the teaching, if it's not just right they drop it and the toddler goes back to playing, unless you make them crawl away from their toys altogether.  Even so, I still have to do the command a few times sometimes to make it work. 
By the way, has anyone figured out why it's so impossible to hand a playing toddler a bottle instead of dropping it on the floor next to them yet?  Still bugging me...

It's a question of clearance around the toddler.  There has to be enough room for the toddler to face the parent to receive the bottle, AND actually be facing the parent, without toys or anything in-between.  Put the toddler in an empty room and the parent can hand it a bottle no problem. :)

DJ sims has a hack to make the bar less attractive as well.
http://www.djssims.com/
"This hack alters the advertising levels of the bar drinks that were changed in Open for Business. Now the drinks are far less appealing, but Sims will still go for them autonomously, because autonomous is always better than obsessive."

I thought the initial idea in the base game was that fun loving sims were more prone to seek out things like games, bars, swings etc.. while serious sims were supposed to aim for the telescopes, chessboards and that sort of thing.  What happened to that?  Now all sims head for the same thing no matter what their personality.  It's annoying.

Personality-affinity advertising does exist, but is not considered a strong factor. Variations in sim behavior are thus small at best, and generally not observable.