More Awesome Than You!

This is not a problem I am having, but rather a friend of mine.  She is not active on any of the forums, so I thought I'd look for her problem, but after a great deal of searching on a number of different boards, I have not found any reports of anything similiar to what she is experiencing.

Background:  Though she did play Sims on the Playstation, she is brand new to TS2, having gotten addicted to it while she was here visiting me.  *smirk*  She went home, bought the core game and both expansion packs and installed all three.  As yet, she has no custom content, though she's been eager to start downloading, but has been waiting until she had a few spare moments to download the Clean Installer and such.  I don't believe she's even created any Sims yet.  However, she has been building houses, just to see what she can do with the original Maxis content.  Here is what she says is happening:

Discussing a really elaborate lot she's making in attempt to recreate something from an anime series:

"...But could SOMEBODY please explain to me why it's worth less and less each time I look at it? XD Yesterday afternoon it was over $600,000. After adding a few flights of stairs and some other stuff, my next check from the neighborhood view had it worth about $420,000. I have added much more since then and now this morning it's less than $160,000! Man, that's some really severe depreciation. Does this mean I can finish it and then wait a few days and eventually I won't even need the motherlode cheat to move them in? XD I'm just wondering if this is a normal part of the game or if I've got some bizarre defect in it."

Discussing another lot she's making, based off one she made on the Playstation:

"I made my old Sims house from the PS2 to see how much it'd cost, and if it'd be possible for a standard issue family to move in without a cheat like they can on the PS2. Built it, saved, went back to neighborhood, and it was about $4,000 too much. I went back in, made it 22 square feet smaller, traded down some items for less expensive ones, saved again, went back to neighborhood, and the cost was now not under 24,000, but 63,375! From making it worth less! This house has no windows, no floor, and no wallcoverings. It was built on a small lot, and has inexpensive furnishings. It should NOT be over 20,000, let alone 60,000! Then at [husband]'s suggestion I went back in and just moved a bunch of stuff around, didn't delete or change anything except the location of the items within the house, and this time when I looked the price was around 32,000 e_e I think there's something wrong with my game."

I told her that if this is the worst bug she gets, she should count herself lucky.  *rolls eyes*  But, I'm interested in knowing if anyone else has experienced this, or if anyone has come across this problem on any of the boards anywhere (I've looked, and I've been keeping up with the NL bugs, but I may have missed something).  Any information anyone can point me to?  Thank you.

Lot values are pretty stable in my neighborhoods. Then again, I'm not the one on a building spree (which in itself could be what's affecting the house values).

In my experience, I'm pretty confident of creating a nice plain house without furnishings for about 10 to 30 K. I've yet to see any serious fluctuation from minor edits.

I build quite often and I've never seen them drop in value.  Even after a sim has vacated a home, I will refurnish it and it retains it value consistantly.

I've seen very minor changes in lot value from what I expect, but I doubt they're because of a bug.  Not sure what would cause such a large fluctuation.

I do know there's a bug in calculating a room's environment score that shows up sometimes.  You'll have a room that has a low environment score no matter what you do.  To fix the room, remove one wall segment (preferably to the outside), go back to live mode and watch one of your Sims while the environment score goes back up, then go back to build mode and replace the wall.  This fixes that room, but sometimes the bugginess migrates to another room and you have to do it again.

The same sort of bug might show up during building mode and cause the lot value to fluctuate strangely.

Hook

Thanks friends, I really appreciate the replies.  I'm starting to think this might be unique to her game, but I'm probably still going to advise her to file a bug report about it over on the official site.  Just so someone knows.  She says it's more of an annoyance than a problem, but still... wild fluctuations like that sort of say "instability" to me.

Anyway, again - thanks for taking the time to reply!   :)