More Awesome Than You!

Pets is really screwing up my University sims. Even my favourite aspiration of Knowledge has stopped rolling up the reliable aspiration-point favourites relating to classes, assignments and term papers and all I'm getting are ludicrous wants to play, command or wash the damn family pet back in the home neighbourhood.
I've had shitloads of uni sims in bloody aspiration failiure because of this and it really shizzles my frickin nizzle.
Bloody Maxis have got some nerve to put this piss-poor crap out and get people to pay to damn well beta-test it because they are all so busy rolling in vast piles of cash.
Gahhh. Rant over.

Can you invite mom and dad and the whole household over so your Sim can play with his much missed pet?

I knew there was a reason why I didn't let my Sims buy a pet before their kids went to college, no matter how much I wanted to see a toddler play with the pet...

Is there a hack? It is driving me insane.

There's nopetobsession, which should at least reduce the pet related wants so your college students can survive.  If inviting the original household doesn't work, maybe mom or dad could invite the student to visit the old homestead and play with the pet there.

Silly question, can a non-YA Sim give a pet to a YA Sim?   I'd love to have a mascot for my new frat house.

You can have parrots and womrats.
And why should I have to drag mum, dad and Fido cum Fluffy to the dorm just because Maxis are a bunch of retards?
Heaven forfend that Apple ever get that sloppy. Perhaps they should just allow exe commands.

I really haven't seen that many problems with pets in this regard. I've had a worse time with money sims in college wanting to buy shit they can't afford than people obsessing about pets. Honestly, the easiest fix without hacks is to just have the sim go on a date. Insta easy wants that can get a sim into platinum fairly quickly. I usually find after a date, the sims stop obsessing about pets anyway.

I do not GET date wants, God help me I don't get go to class or do assignment wants. I don't even get buy an expensive TV or buy a painting wants.
There are no "be friends with Professor So-and-So" wants nor any wants to fall in love or meet someone new.
If the family had a pet then it is wall-to-wall pet.play, cuddle.
Worse than piss-poor. I could bloody well programme better than that!

I get stuck like this with certain sims.  They can be any aspiration, and roll up endless strings of "get a puppy" AND "get a kitten" AND "get a puppy/kitten" AND "play with some stupid stray I've only seen once" etcetera, etcetera...

Yep, some sims get really obsessive pet wants and some don't.  It doesn't depend too much on aspiration, though in my game I noticed that family sims tend to be the most obsessive about pets.  I had one family sim that almost always rolled all six want panels full of pet wants and nothing but pet wants.  It was pretty annoying.  Thank God he was the worst and most of my sims are a lot more balanced in their wants.  I don't know if I would get a hack specific to this behavior, though I would probably do so if all of my sims were that obsessive about their pets.  Personally I'm really looking forward to Pescado's tweaking of the want tree to be more realistic and less obsessive about stupid things.  I'm definitely trying that out when he gets it finished.

Dream

all those PLUS fearing that the said virtually unknown stray gets sprayed by a skunk.....
perhaps that would be a blessing....any sensible sim wouldn't have any wants to pet the damn thing afterwards...
would they????

Do not rely upon it. On present showing this piss-poor programming can and does relate to pets the sim never even met.

Thats pretty crappy, i got petz as part of my xmas gift but with all these problems and pet obession stories, im hesitant to introduce it to my Vampire Ruled Zombie Wasteland (also known as Pleasentville)

Don't be put off. It can be a fun EP. Just avoid sending teens with a pet in the family to Uni.
I'd hate to spoil your present. Do enjoy it and a Happy Christmas

yes it does seem to be a problem with YAs at Uni who have pets back in the family home.
i've got Lucy Burb with nothing but wants to do something with her dog
i usually cheat her aspiration to max every so often with the DMA burglar alarm thingummy
or merolas painting

Just back up, install, and get all the new versions of JMP's and 2Jeffs' hacks.

I will look into this and put an axe to it at some point. Because it's simply not POSSIBLE to interact with a nonresident pet and there is no way to phone one and invite it over.

Honestly, if you're not getting ANY wants other than pet related wants, you've probably got something else going on there than just EA programming. If it was EA programming, then everyone would be having the same problem, and as I said, I haven't seen what you're describing.

Sure, there's a degree of pet obsession when you install the expansion, but with my experience, it hasn't been any worse than the wants related to any particular expansion. If you're seriously only getting pet related wants, I'd check your hacks and downloads to see if you've got anything that's not up to date, or specifically geared towards wants. Maybe it's interferring.

I find nopetobsession really helps, and have you also tried rerolling their wants with the lot debugger?

Maybe that's the purpose of "invite household"...

What the hell am I supposed to do with a million useless people jamming the lot?

Pet the dog you're pining so for.
No I agree, it's idiotic.

i've thought about this a bit more and reflected on Lucy Burb some more....i have nothing better to do with my Xmas Day

I have no hacks which relate to Wants and/or Fears myself
Every time i have ever played Lucy Burb in college, she has never been too keen on that book learning malarkey, seems to be part of her
character and whatever Aspiration she is given
before Pets she always wanted dates, babies etc (i never played uni with OFB as my laptop struggled...i have a new PC now)
Pets just seems to have replaced all those wants
Maybe with Seasons she'll be hankering after being struck by lightning....

Part of the underlying problem is that a sim can never visit another sim. This makes sense: If you did, the visited sims would all die since you can't tell them what to do and they'd get disoriented in their massive houses and kill themselves doing stupid things since they would lack the safety net of being able to flee to their off-screen sanctum, since you are now invading it.

You could invite the sim that wants to pet the dog over, but this leads to another problem: Since you can't tell that sim to do what he wants to do, and the AI is very stupid, he has no ability to comprehend how to go about fulfilling the want. He will promptly get confused by the house he's visiting and forget to pet the dog he came to visit.

well you could get an unawesome hack (cough insimenatorcough) and make the sim selectable. 

I don't need a HACK for that, I can just shift-click.

Doesn't this seem like an extreme length to go to just to pet a dog, though? I could just tell him to get in his car and drive, then CRTL-Click and pretend he went home to pet the dog if I really wanted to go to that length.

yes, that is extreme.   It is a sillly want. Mine have it all the time. I use reroll wants with the lot debugger. Occassionally it helps. 

I have the latest version of nopetobsession, and it doesn't seem to help with my game.  My downloads are few, and I have only a couple of non-awesome mods (breastfeeding, longerburningfires, and noquitemployees).  I just want to murder Mary-Sue Pleasant because I don't WANT her to have twenty cats now that she's kicked Daniel to the curb...

Sounds like Mary Sue needs a hot stud to help her get over Daniel.

Hmmm...  Maybe it's time to create a Rudy Valentino for the Sims 2.   :D

Arrange for Mary-Sue to meet Komei Tellerman -- they had 3 bolts in my game and a very nice post-Daniel relationship until her death from old age. :)

 :D :D :D

I'll have to do that!  Maybe some casual woohoo is the cure for her...  I had her two obnoxious teens move out just as soon as dad split because all they did is mope and cry.  She never did teach Angela to study because they'd piss each other off just being in each other's vicinity.

I'm pretty sure the game actually triggers "become crazy cat lady" deliberately after such events.

Annoyingly enough, I have a sim who is the designated Crazy Cat Lady of my hood; she's an elder family sim and I've given her the idiotic kitty LTW with some cheating in SimPE, I've moved a bunch of strays into her lot with the pet teleporter thing from MTS2, but the stupid hag is not rolling many pet obsession wants.
In stead she wants to learn cooking, and get a job in law enforcement.

Should she be popularity in stead of family?

The pet obsession wants are squelched by the presence of an actual pet, which is why you don't see them anymore.

OK. From a bit of messing about I have learned that the original relationship level with the pet seems to trigger this pet-related wants response. It isn't entirely consistent, and can occur randomly but to a lesser extent

Getting the parents to invite the Uni sim home usually does result in a few autonomous interactions between pet and sim but these are, as JM says, entirely uncontrollable and it is pure luck if you happen to hit on a want.
Interestingly, when the Uni sim goes back to college the wants often reset to normal then after you fulfill a few drop back into pet-related idiocy never to return to reasonable.
Sharpen that axe JM.

Just lock one or two of the ones you don't plan to fulfil right away.  Should help keep them sane longer...

Erm, you don't think I DID that?

I sometimes forget to unlock the want they're about to fulfill and lock another one I want to keep, especially when I'm trying to watch multiple Sims.  I assumed you had brain farts too.

Sorry miros that was uneccesarily snappy, I certainly do suffer from cerebral flatulence but this issue is driving me so nuts I obsessively lock each and every pathetic attainable want.
Imagine getting over-excited about a "do assignment" want!
Christ on a bike I must be going madder than a bag of eels.

No problem.  Now I'm too paranoid to get a pet for a toddler.  Maybe I could put the kid on the Slacker track and skip University.

It dosen't happen to every University sim but of course, you don't know when the Pets Wants Spam will strike, and it is cat (or dog) astrophic when it does.
I'm amazed that the problem can hit any aspiration, any personality and it is more persistent than a Mormon on Sunday morning.

I honestly wouldn't pay too much attention to sim aspirations while in Uni. Most aspirations are basically impossible to do anything with in Uni because of how limited in scope Uni is. Since there's absolutely no *USE* for aspiration or mood in Uni anyway, it doesn't matter. Uni has no mood-dependent attributes that platinum would actually help with.

Will that be addressed in harderuni?

Don't Sims get a higher grade boost from going to class if they're in a better mood?  ???

Doesn't class performance vary slightly by mood?

Don't think so -- I've had sims in bad moods get just as much credit as sims in good moods.  I think 'class performance' is based on the amount of time the sim actually spends in class, and not on how they feel when they go there.

Which is one of the key reasons uni is so damn lame. I have failed students who have been to every class, for christ's sake.

I have to disagree with the notion that aspiration has no effect on uni.
Indeed it does, fortune and knowledge sims are (or were, pre-pets) much the most likely to roll up university-related wants. Knowledge sims in particular used to be very easy to keep in platinum as they were constantly rolling up go to class, do group research, do assignment, do term paper, finish semester and get on deans list wants.
Fortune sims had similar wants but were much more apt to cheat ,as in getting influence wants to get other folk to do their assignments or term papers.
Romance sims were as sluttish as usual and wanted to WhooHoo every professor in sight. Popularity always wanted to join Greek Houses and be big sims on campus. Pleasure had the usual mishmash of crap low-scoring wants mostly related to dating and worst of all family sims were the hardest of all to keep happy at college.
About Grilled Cheese I will maintain a discreet silence.

Lol, I have an adult Grilled Cheese Sim and all he ever wants is: Make Grilled Cheese, Serve Grilled Cheese, Eat Grilled Cheese, Make Grilled Cheese for <family member>.  He also has 10 cooking and force feeds grilled cheese to the kids.  The mom had to make quiche while the dad was sleeping one night just for something different.

BTW, Grilled Cheese gets you about 35 food points with the Headmaster.

Aspiration is easy to manage at Uni if you use the college clock, because you can send your knowledge and fortune sims to exams as soon as their grade bars are full, and that keeps the tide of wants about academic things coming. The problem with aspiration arises if you aren't speeding them through, because you can pretty much get all the grade-related wants out of the way in a day, and then there are two days left for them to roll up stupid wants about pets and whatnot.

Popularity and romance sims are easier, and family sims drive me insane with their wants to be best friends with people they only met 5 minutes ago.

I've managed to somewhat curb my compulsive desire to keep all my sims in gold or platinum.  I believe JMP's assertion is that while you can achieve a gold or aspiration for Uni sims, it's not particularly useful to them.  Almost nothing they are required to do is improved by having a plat asp. meter.

That said, I am in the camp that observes better class performance from sims in plat.  My perma-plat sims get more credit from each hour of class they attend, compared to their sorority sisters in green.  However, it's hardly noticeable since the additional credit from a 3-hour class easily swamps the effect from plat in a 2-hour one.  And really, does anyone even need to send their sims to all their classes?  I have a few that I play like this, but it's only for my amusement.  I could get them through far more expeditiously in any of a dozen other ways.

This is one of those fuzzy issues that I hate not having numbers so here goes:

Mood varies from -100 to 100. If mood is less than -10 they use the "Low Mood" table for grading in that major. If mood is less than 55 they use the "Med Mood" table, and 55 or higher gives you the "High Mood" table for grading. This is roughly how it works. See the particular Major BCONs if you're interested in the details.

I just put them on College... Rampage as soon as the semester starts until they have a high grade and then send them to the final with the college clock when their whole "class" is at least around an A level. If I get bored or some of them get their grades sooner then I will work in a few relationship things, but mostly I just want them out of Uni as soon as possible.

One of these days I will try the greek house and secret society thing, but so far I have only gone for degrees and only very rarely play it for any significant length of time.

That's what phonehack and autoyak are for...  I find that extended phone calls one day apart will make them best friends pronto.

I have them College->Rampage at the beginning of the semester, then do social stuff after. 

In new hoods, I actually start the Greek house from scratch with a playable Sim and his or her townie significant other (or dormie if he or shee never fell for one of the townies), then have a sibling and his or her significant other become pledges, move in, and take over the running of the place.  After 2 or 3 playables with 7K scholarships, they've got a pretty nice place!

Nope. Mood has no real effect on Uni-anything.