"mw1525;d-1008640" wrote:
So, is this behavior of choosing another place to go instead of returning home normal? Am I mis-remembering their initial programming?
I remember when I came across this behavior myself and was confused. However, I only noticed this thing that you're talking about happening if I switched households.
For example: I play Household A. I switch to Household B. The members of Household B are scattered all over the town map. I zoom in on one of the sims (let's call her Zsa Zsa), and see that she's walking towards the library. Then, all of a sudden, Zsa Zsa decides to go to the public pool. I think this is what you're talking about, where sims seem to make a decision to go somewhere else instead of going straight home. What you call an "active sim" changing its mind might've been from a non-active household that you switched to.
I think the reason why this happens is that non-active households are programmed to act as townies, going where the game tells them to regardless of free will. (Let's call this "Townie Mode.") Townie Mode is what makes it so that when you take your active sim to a venue, other sims show up on their own. They didn't show up because of free will. They showed up because the game decides how many sims are to show up there and then hand picks them.
When you switch over to another household, and it turns out that some of those members are in Townie Mode, the game is still in control of where they're going. So, they are stuck in that mode until you reset them or there is some other trigger.
I think this programming accounts for what is known as the "energy bar bug." This is the bug where, when you switch over to another household, the sims have a frozen energy bar at full. I think they made it so that non-active sims could have enough energy as "townies" to hang out on community lots and walk from place to place without starving to death or collapsing, but that the kinks in this system were never ironed out. The sims that were in "townie mode" continue to have these frozen bars, but the sims that were in rabbitholes are unaffected.