I've been playing for countless hours on multiple households since the launch of this pack with the balance and luck mechanics both disabled. In all that time, I haven't once seen a sim spontaneously contract an ailment, and so I'm genuinely mystified by comments I've read with players reporting that ailments are rampant within the game even with those gameplay mechanics disabled.
The only time I ever see sims with ailments is when I'm playing on my Sim in the Naturopath career, and only when she chooses to treat clients at her home (because at that point, the game will randomly choose a sim to be a treatable client and force an ailment on that sim).
The only major issue I've come across is that the option to prevent fairies from turning up in worlds outside of Innisgreen in their fairy forms doesn't seem to work.
I have heard now 2 different players (including you) saying they are not contracting ailments but mostly I hear they are non-stop contracting/infection. I wonder if existing vs. new games play a part?
All my new games have been getting ailments but my household do have multiple occults (spellcasters, not fairies, though). So I wonder if occults are more likely to contract. I always head to HQ in the Magic Realm for several days to learn spells. etc. And within 24(Sim)hrs all of them are with an ailment. Within days the Sages are getting the ailments and it just spreads from there.
I also wonder if single Sim households reduce incredibly chance of ailments as well.
One thing that may account for this is that the Sims Team does testing.
Certain aspects of the game...are modified for certain players in different "testing groups". While the tuning is the same, something deeper in the game files tells them to behave differently. I believe this pack has 4 testing groups- so there's 4 sets of people out there with 4 different sets of rates and such on this sort of thing.
When they said they will be looking into this in the last laundry list, they meant "We have analytics on how these features are behaving and will be picking the most reasonable looking set and go from there". I wish they were transparent about this.
Even though I am in the high frequency statistic for getting ailments, I also like the chaos (sometimes keeping them for the 3 days, it is too easy getting positive moodlet stacking) to liking the management by having a Naturopath/Apothecary Skilled Sim and Spellcaster Sims to manage the effects (Repairo the broken/burnt things upgrading the low luck quality items, etc.). But it turned my life is easy as a Spellcaster play to high maintenance—a mid range between would probably be best in the long run even for my gameplay style.
It may be a new game vs existing game discrepancy, but if that were the case, I'd have expected the current ratio of players complaining of rampant ailments to players indicating that they've seen little to no ailments to be completely the other way around.
