"plumboy23;d-1007616" wrote:
It's been a long time since I got an invitation from a NPC.. restaurants, gym, their house, whatever. Are you still getting them? Is this on purpose? The game seems dead without the world trying to get you out of the house.
You touch upon one of my main gripes about this game.
So warning this is going to be long. I know some players think the phone rings way too often, but the nerfing of the NPC phone calls has been extremely frustrating for those of us who enjoyed them. They took a massive hit with the Eco Lifestyle patch back in June 2020 where they put in a bunch of new phone calls - albeit only if you bought the pack which meant that if you didn’t, you just got stuck with the nerfing. They’ve since moved some of the Eco calls to base game, but it doesn’t make up for the loss in my opinion. The Windenburg rave parties have become near extinct as have the rabbit hole invites to the circus, opera and I forget what the other one or two was/were, because I haven’t seen them in so long. I think the ones where your sim gets invited to go to comedy night at a lounge are still there, but they seem quite rare as well, and the same goes for the ones to go gawk at celebrities and ask for autographs in Del Sol Valley.
"plumboy23;d-1007616" wrote:
It was so nice when you got promoted and a friend invite you to a restaurant to celebrate it.
Yes it was, but the Dine Out calls no longer exist at all. I bought Dine Out two weeks prior to the aforementioned patch and it was a glorious two weeks where my sim would receive phone calls from her love interest with wordings such as “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you, let’s go out and have dinner at XYZ restaurant”. I’m well aware that some will say that your sim’s love interest will still invite your sim out on a date and it
might still be to a restaurant if you’ve placed some somewhere in your worlds, but the wording is the same as with every other date invite and no longer quite as romantic. I’ve read that some players found it a lot less romantic that your sim had to pay the check when they hadn’t been the one to extend the invitation, but still there was as always the option to just say no thank you.
I also liked the idea of the one you mentioned although the sim, who called my sim about going out to celebrate her promotion, was someone she didn’t even know instead of one of her friends, so that felt a bit weird. But if it had been one of her friends, it would have been grand. Unless I’ve missed it, there doesn’t seem to be any way for our sims to tell their family or friends when they get a promotion and it’s rather sad that there isn’t an option to celebrate this beyond the moodlet our sims get. Yes, we can of course just take our sim’s family and/or friends out to a restaurant or bar or whatever to pretend a celebration, but it was nice when the game kind of acknowledged it as well.
But alas after the Eco patch these calls are now a thing of the past, and it’s just rather frustrating that we can’t do anything about it.
Thankfully, we still have the City Living festival invites as others have mentioned. It doesn’t matter too much that every now and then it’ll skip these invites in my games, because one of my sims will usually get an invitation to the following festival. My sims also get the invites to visit a friend’s house, and if they’re in a club, they also seem to get invitations to hangout at different places, I think bars and night clubs (although these might very well happen if your sim isn’t part of a club, I just can’t remember if being in a club at least ups the chances for an invite) - but especially at the rave party locations, which are not to be mistaken for the actual rave party invites. They are not!!
Currently I’m doing a Neighborhood Stories test save which means that I also get the calls about coming over to admire a newborn or adopted baby or a cat or a dog. But as with quite a few of the calls, these, unfortunately, do seem to pop up at less opportune moments. And to get most of these calls, you need to allow for these options to be active in Neighborhood Stories, and that can lead to it’s own kind of mess or fun depending on how you like your game to behave.
As I’m still on the werewolves patch mainly due to wants and fears replacing whims (I’ll go whine about that in another thread), I’ve no idea how much phone calls from newer packs have influenced the chance of getting certain older phone calls. I hope that every type of call, no matter how old it is, has an equal chance of happening, but of course that also means that when more calls are added to the game, the chance of getting a particular call becomes smaller, and some calls just seem much more persistent than others. As is I’m constantly going out of my way to keep my sims’ reputation from going above good, because if it does, that’ll just set off the influx of job offers and charity donation calls. If I knew for sure that these calls have no effect on the likelihood of receiving other calls, that these were calls my sims can get as a sort of extra calls, I wouldn’t mind them as much, but the way they seem to overtake my sims’ phone lines is extremely annoying. The charity calls seem to serve no purpose beyond raising a sim’s reputation which hardly drops anyway, unless you really make an effort, and never seems to drop on its own. The result: my farmer with a pristine reputation ended up getting spammed with job offers six days out of seven and some days more than once. It felt as though they overtook some of the more fun calls that makes the world surrounding my sims feel alive, but as I said, I’m not 100% sure that that is actually the case, it just felt like it.
