Social Menus Too Difficult to Navigate
There needs to be a solution with the social menus. As new packs are added on and more socials are added to the menu, the menu becomes harder to navigate. Especially in times when I need to select ...
Forum Discussion
@PugLove888 I made it practice to pause the game to search for the right interaction. 😅 And now with the new Stuff Pack Paranormal there will be even more types of interactions as I have seen in the Livestream about Paranormal. Especially when you want to play the Freelance option. I agree with you that there should be more sub categories or options in the friendly menu. And I also support your ideas about the categories.
However, the problem I have with one of my Sims (the one I have been playing from the beginning) is that he has all the skills maxed out and almost all the traits. He also has had loads of jobs and reached almost every achievable goal. It would be a great idea to be able to select more sub categories but the problem will remain. To select an interesting social interaction in his case still will takes ages. 🥴
@Trismagistos , I forget that people don't pause the game to choose socials and to interact with objects!!! 😃🤣 I always pause the game! I can't watch a relative of mine play because they never pause the game and it drives me bonkers! 🤪 But that is good that you mentioned it in case someone else reading this hasn't thought of that! 😎
But even with the game paused it still takes me a long time to sort through all the choices, and even more so when your choice doesn't come up at all and you have to click off so the choices reset in hopes that the one you are looking for will be there this time.
And you bring up an excellent point about Sims who have maxed many or all of the skills! 😇
Of course, it will take a bit of time no matter how socials are formatted, like you said, but I think sub-menus (at least with in the Friendly socials) would help with a lot of this. This is where I disagree with @canelacaliente . Getting rid of socials is a problem... not everybody will agree in what to get rid of, and like @JonaO703 stated, some of the not necessary ones are great to pass time or to just provide variety if you are trying to fill your Sims social need! 🙌 Not only this, but for people who have their whims activated (which I always do) sometimes Sims get a whim to "Get to Know" somebody that they already know all the traits, so eliminating this choice completely should not happen! I think if your Sims already knows all the traits of someone, then it should always be at the back of the choices, but if they don't know all the traits of that person that it should always be near the front of the choices! 🤔 As it is right now it is random, and that doesn't help anybody!!! 😞
@canelacaliente , if the choices are better organized, than that will greatly reduce the amount of time wading through them! "Friendly" socials is such a large category that it has become a dumping ground for all the interactions that don't fit neatly anywhere else.😞 By having sub-categories, we can eliminate a bunch of options simply by not clicking on the sub-category head! So, if you want only work-related socials, you would just click on that sub-category and ignore the other sub-categories like "weather" , "vampires" , "family", "neighborhood", "creative", etc. This would streamline it so much! I think we need organization, not elimination! 🙂
I also think having the choices off to the side might interfere with our action queue icons. The right side would be better though.😉 However, I like the social choices to be right where I click when I click on a Sim to socialize with... I don't want to have to go back and forth with my mouse if I want to do multiple socials, clicking on the Sim and then going to the side of the screen over and over. That would actually a bit longer.☹️ Plus, every version of the Sims has had the social menu as a pie menu. And if they ever were going to change that, I think it would be best to do that in TS5 or some future version where they could design that from the beginning.
And if we could have some sort of stabilized order, without a social being at the beginning of the pie menu, only to be pushed to the back at the next interaction or randomly disappearing, then that would be a great help! 😅
@PugLove888 I didn't even think about the whims, mainly since I don't have them turned on in my game. I tried it once and started getting lost in trying to achieve them. Also, I think if lists were generated, they should not be persistent. They should pop up and go away just like they do now. Maybe players could be given an option of what menu layout they want to use in gameplay options.
@canelacaliente I agree perhaps sub-menus could lead to a problem similar to the one we have now. I do think the friendly socials need to be broken up, though. Again, I like your idea of a list to help navigate them. There are already lists / menus built into the game; food / drink ordering, rewards store. I'm sure those could be modified and made a bit more compact to fit the social menu. Maybe socials based on traits, career, specific packs, etc. could be given their own menus in the list icons as you suggested.
I was just looking at those gameplay options. I always play with the TS4 social menu in lieu of enabling the "traditional" pie menu. That menu is described as "grouping actions by type rather than contextual relevance." I think part of the problem is that the "contextual relevance" seems to be off a bit. Regardless of any changes made to the layout, whatever part of the game that governs the display of social options needs to be tweaked. I have no idea what the game considers to be relevant to the situational context but many times, the initial socials don't fit at all. The Winterfest holiday socials are a good example. Often, "complain about Winterfest" is the only one that pops up in the initial menu. The others like "sing" and "share spirit" are usually buried four to five levels deep. I've noticed on dates, "deep conversation" is one of the requirements but that was changed to "share stories of personal challenges" and that one is almost always in the fifth or sixth menu. (By the way, I really would like that date requirement to be changed to match the "share stories" verbiage but I guess that's a topic for a different thread.)@JonaO703 , I can totally understand how you could get caught up with completing whims! 😃 I used to be the same way, but have been able to igore some of them, and then just focus on those ones I really want to do! I find they are a great source of rewards points and if I want to purchase the Rewards items then I need the points to do so! 😉 But for players who never use these reward items or traits, then there really isn't any reason to complete the whims! 😅
I am a bit confused where you said " Also, I think if lists were generated, they should not be persistent. They should pop up and go away just like they do now." 🤔 I think you might have meant to answer my point about the social interaction menu conflicting with the action queue, but I also mentioned this could be fixed by putting the social interactions on the right side of the screen. 😉 But my main problem with the list idea was that if my Sim is in one area of the screen, the social options should be near the Sim, and not not near the edges of the screen like @canelacaliente 's examples showed. So, if they do ever do a socials list, I hope it would be near the subject you are interacting with! 🙂
That said, I still don't think anyone understands why I think submenus for the some of the existing Friendly interactions would be helpful. I think they would be helpful because submenus already work! What I mean by that is that if you are doing Romantic interactions, the choices from the Mean interactions menu never show up in the Romance submenu! And the only Joke interactions that show up in the Romance menu is the "tell dirty joke" choice, which makes sense. This is what I want for the current Friendly interactions, the ones like Weather and Vampires, and Work-related interactions! The "Friendly category is entirely too large as it exists now. It needs to be broken up in some way and better organized!
I don't really want a list of interactions because while we won't have to click as much, we will still have to do a lot of scrolling! 😞 I don't want to have to wade through a long list of choices without any organization to the system! 😣 So if it is the New Years Eve and all those choices are at top, then I still have to wade through all of them to find a work or vampire, or other category? That would still be tedious. ☹️
I do completely agree with you about the holiday socials since it is always the complaining one first and all the ones anyone is most likely to want to use are all 5 or 6 clicks deep ! That is really aggravating! 😥
While I love the idea of them giving us a choice of weather we use the traditional (but improved!) pie menu or a list, I don't think they will do that, unfortunately/
I guess what it boils down to is that it would be nice if we could see different versions in action of what each person is suggesting instead of just us trying to describe what we actually mean! 😅
It would be really funny if we could do this and then all of us change our minds and I end up wanting a list and you and @canelacaliente ended up wanting better division and organization in the categories'! 🤣😉@PugLove888 I think you hit on one really big point here when you said "I don't think they will do that" pertaining to having the menu options. I'm not optimistic we'll see any of this change, especially with so little participation in the discussion.
Actually, my initial reply was the first in this thread to mention submenus. So I agree with you that we need to separate the friendly socials somehow. Maybe what I said wasn't exactly clear though. I was just trying to see @canelacaliente 's point that it still forces you to dive into further menus. I really am not trying to fight with you. You're trying to understand what others are saying and I certainly appreciate that.
Ultimately, everyone is going to have their own preference. “You can’t please all the people all of the time” (John Lydgate) To be clear, I'd like to have the Friendly socials separated, whether by sub-menus or new primary menus labeled by trait, pack, career, etc. Either way, it will still give us a bunch of things to search for and click but at least it will be more organized and easier to find the ones you want. I also think navigation would be easier to display in a list and if that means it appears as an opaque menu overlaying the active sim, that's okay by me. Currently the pie wheel only gives us a certain number of menus / socials to choose from. So I personally think a list would be able to show more at once and easier to navigate. Though I do realize others will have a different preference. And as I also said before, pushing socials related to events / holidays to the top would be most helpful.
I do hope we hear more ideas from other players on this topic. I hope others click "me too" to show the developers that this topic is important. Until that happens, I think we're just going around in circles.
