YOU GUYS!!!!!! HAVE YOU SEEN THE PATCH NOTES TODAY??? I'm so happy I could cry!
Dine Out
Thank you, @SimGuruNick!
Workaround Update: I tried having my chefs cook carefully, and used the organic ingredients (10%) rather than fresh GMO ((25%) in order to save costs and it still works! Also put paintings in the kitchen which gave an inspired moodlet, and have the perks which cause sims to buy more expensive food, all the discount perks, and patient diners perk. Chefs seem to be quicker at cooking carefully than they were last time I played. Was able to turn a 1500 simoleon profit. Fully skilled chefs are now producing a mixture of excellent and normal food across skill levels 3 -5. However, it is definitely a lot more difficult than it has been in the past, plus i noticed a few other bugs :
Chef's do not produce Excellent food or drinks past difficulty level 3. I have used the best ingredients, the slowest cooking speed, the Inspirational Speech perk, and 3 Inspiration boosting kitchen/bar items from the Culinary career line for each station. All my menu items are difficulty levels 4 and 5 and over the course of many shifts the Chefs have never prepared a single dish or drink that is higher than Normal (nor have they ever produced one that is Poor). Further to that, the Inspiration boosting items do not appear to have any impact as I have also operated multiple shifts with them deactivated with the exact same results, Normal food only, nothing Excellent and nothing Poor. Whatever is negating the influence of the Chef's Cooking and Mixology level 10 on food and drinks may also be negating the impact of being in an Inspired mood (or the Chef's may not be affected by the items when on shift as there is no way to engage them in dialogue to reveal their mood).
I thought about it after I posted my message to Nick here, but I didn't. I'll do it now.
EA Staff (Retired)My QA team is definitely aware of this issue, and has reproduced it as well. I don't know when this will be fixed, but from what I understand the issue is due to overly complicated tuning, and thus it's not a simple fix. Apparently there are way too many variables involved with determining the final food quality. It seems that there is almost no quality gain from being a high skill chef, but there is a massive quality hit from recipe difficulty.
There's not much more I can say (as that's all I know), but thank you so much to everyone who provided me with info and save files and helped our QA team narrow this one down. 🙂
