Would you buy a “Shopping Mall” GamePack?

"Dannydanbo;c-16593691" wrote:


With all due respect to you, you can build a "mall" and divide it up into different stores. As many stores as you like, but it would still be considered one store on one lot. You can place a food cart(s) in your store, however, currently, you must pay for someone to man it. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the future.

Also, you would be limited to a max of three clerks per lot, so a huge mall divided into stores would be a waste because sims will congregate in one or two spots near the register no matter how big your store is. If a sim does wander off to purchase something far from the register, if you see them, by the time your clerk reaches them, they are angry and walking off in a huff. Retail is meant for small shops, not huge malls.

If they gave us a mall building shell with several separate lots inside it (similar to apartments in CL but horizontal) they would still be separate lots with loading screens. Plus, with the limited number of lots allowed in a world, a third to a half of your lots are in one spot. However, the numbers tell the devs that retail isn't played enough to warrant building a mall of any kind, so we are back to MP.

You assume a lot in the bolded portion. If a shopping mall venue were created, what makes you think that the present restrictions would remain? New features should and do mean adjustments to preexisting norms.

My whole reason for wanting a shopping mall venue is so that those restrictions will be abolished. IIRC, since the original game, TS4 is the only game in the series to be so restrictive regarding NPC spawn points. In addition, the community has been begging for proper cash registers and queues. (The way that sales are made now probably has a lot to do with why retail isn't so popular as it was in TS2.) A shopping mall venue would be a prime opportunity for EA to create cash register objects and to allow a register for each "store".

Finally, a shopping mall shouldn't have loading screens between stores. A shopping mall with loading screens would be anathema to the entire idea of a mall in the first place.

I was able to build functioning malls for TS2 and TS3. If it was possible over a decade ago, if the team is willing to put in the work, it should be a possibility now.

As for shells, I'm opposed to any kind of shell that resembles what we got in CL. I want options of how malls look and where they are located. Shells like those that were introduced in CL won't provide either option.

NO - I would not in Sims 4.

I don’t know if I would buy a mall pack. All clothes are already free so I don’t see what it would really add without heavily overlapping GTW’s retail. In general the game needs some multipurpose lots. A lot type where you can merge the functions of 2-4 different lot types. This would benefit retail by adding in a better format for mall making.

No I don't think I would due to having get to work.

"FKM100;c-16600887" wrote:
I don't think I would buy a whole game pack just to get a shopping mall, but I would certainly love to see more shopping items and activities in the game. My opinion of GTW is that the retail side was quite well done from the POV of the retailer, but was not properly considered from the POV of the shopper. I used to love to send my sims out shopping in Sims 1, because they had fun browsing the various displays, would do this autonomously, and they could buy things that were not already available in CAS or BB. It was a fun and worthwhile activity. Shopping in Sims 4 is pretty meh. I agree, though, that it would be a lot better if we could have multiple-use venues and vendors that would spawn automatically on these lots.

I agree

I should perhaps add that I do have a few shopping malls in my game already and they do work, sort of. They don't attract huge quantities of customers, like you would get in a shopping mall in RL, but customers do come and there are shop assistants, although they don't man the cash registers the way they did in previous iterations of the game (@Writin_Reg, if you did not get any customers or sales staff at all, it sounds as though the lot you downloaded might have been bugged).

As previously mentioned, the game sees the mall as just one big shop, but because I made these malls as venues for my sims to visit and hang out, and not because I want to play as the retailer, that doesn't bother me too much. Nor do I have to worry about issues like checkout times. It does bother me that the shop assistants are not tied to the cash registers, because it looks weird to have a shop with no assistants in it, and it annoys the heck out of me that baristas and other vendors do not spawn automatically. I have a mod for the latter and I also recently found a modded cash register by Cinderellimouse that allows sims to purchase harvestables and fish directly from the register, which is nice. They are based on the vendor stands from CL and C&D, although (sadly) they do not actually spawn a vendor. I wish there were more shopping interactions available though.

Something else that bothers me about retail lots in general - and I have no hope that it will ever be fixed - is that it always seems to be the same customers who pitch up, irrespective of where the shop is situated and what it is selling. There is always Bella Goth (she's everywhere in my game), Candi and Yuki Behr (I don't know why, since I hardly ever play with them) and a few other arbitrary characters, some pre-mades and some I created myself. How I wish they would at least stick to their own neighborhoods!

"Dannydanbo;c-16615673" wrote:
@cynna Now who's being condescending. I love how some people love to point out the flaws in other people by using the same methods they are pointing out as wrong.

Actually, I wasn't the one who pointed out your condescension. However, I wholly agreed.

In any case, I made my point for why I would like multi-function lots/shopping malls and for why I absolutely encourage "dreams", speculation, and requests for features that players would like to see. Since you didn't bother to respond to either of those points, I guess that this portion of the conversation is over.

@EA_Cian, Sorry. I didn't see your post until after I'd already made this one. My apologies.

would I buy a shopping mall game pack.

I don't know. impossible to say yes or no without seeing what content and game play would be included!

Only if it worked like a real shopping mall with stores having their own staff and not one cashier/set of staff for each store and if I could have multi lot types for one lot then yes.