Neighborhood Stories OFF button

"83bienchen;c-18018755" wrote:
Anyone already know what the calls asking whether Sim X should spend more time with Sim Y calls mean? Is ist just friendship or are they asking to involve in a romantic relationship as @Sharonia wrote?

I just got such a call from an elder female that is happily married with three children and the Sim she wanted to get involved in was a mean young adult who is also married - I was too scared to tell her she shall go for it, especially as I'm playing this familiy on rotation).

I am not sure about this one. I answered yes one time and it seemed like it was just a friendship but I really should have checked the sims to see if the romantic bar changed. The message I got back was something like we had a good time and they were quite amusing. Sounded like friendship.

You know this system is even worse when the pop ups are vague and you are not sure what is going to happen if you say yes. They really need to be clear about these things. I just hate this system with a passion. I am sure my sims are possibly losing friends because I have been just saying no to everything lately. I just want an off button. I create my own drama. In a sense this system is still just making me have to create my own drama so what is the point?

"lunaoddity;c-18019487" wrote:
I updated my game. One of my sims called about finding a ring in her boyfriend's stuff. Can't remember the specifics. After 10 seconds of staring at the screen :D I said no. The reply for this was: "You think so? I wasn't sure... but you're right. I guess it just wasn't written in the stars."

I love to take pictures of every special moment so I don't think I'll say yes to these engagement calls that often. I didn't feel like answering the phone after that. For now, at least you won't get the pop up window unless you click to answer the phone.

Edit: I'll see how it goes in other households.

I have been ignoring calls a lot lately because I don't even want to get asked any questions.

I for one, am enjoying watching this latest EA debacle. I cannot understand why this was released unfinished. No ON/OFF switch? Amazing. All I can think is it's some kind of test being carried out on the players. No way am I updating. I may never update again.

Another thing I cannot figure out is how these "stories" relate in any way to "story progression." It's not "story progression." I won't go through all the examples I'm seeing posted everywhere, so many have been mentioned already. I do personally like the "pregnancy" phone call where the other party isn't pregnant and never was. LOL.

I will give you a couple of examples of "story progression" using MCCC. I have a save that I've been playing for a while and I just found out that Nancy Landgraab is pregnant. Yes Nancy. Not the most "family" oriented sim in the game. Anyway, Nancy is pregnant and that is a surprising and fun twist to the game. My two sims are acquainted with the Landgraabs but why would Geoffrey or Nancy call my sim to ask if they should get pregnant? I mean do you see the absurdity of that? Maybe not. What would their decision to get pregnant have to do with my sims? That is how "story progression" works. Sims living, loving, divorcing, making babies. That's the whole point. It would be like a neighbor of mine that I met in passing at the block party calling me to ask if they should have a baby.

Another example in the same save, is a few sim days ago Bjorn and Clara Bjergsen got divorced. I would not have expected that. And Bjorn is romantically involved with the pizza delivery lady, LOL. Poor Clara. An example of real "story progression." Again, why on earth would Bjorn call my sim to ask him if he should leave his wife? Or my sim call Bjorn to tell HIM to leave his wife? Nothing but an absurdity is this new system of "stories." Story progression should be sims going about their sim lives. That's what enriches the game. That's what makes the game interesting. Not random phone calls. Sheesh.

"inmyeye;c-18020221" wrote:
I for one, am enjoying watching this latest EA debacle. I cannot understand why this was released unfinished. No ON/OFF switch? Amazing. All I can think is it's some kind of test being carried out on the players. No way am I updating. I may never update again.

Another thing I cannot figure out is how these "stories" relate in any way to "story progression." It's not "story progression." I won't go through all the examples I'm seeing posted everywhere, so many have been mentioned already. I do personally like the "pregnancy" phone call where the other party isn't pregnant and never was. LOL.

I will give you a couple of examples of "story progression" using MCCC. I have a save that I've been playing for a while and I just found out that Nancy Landgraab is pregnant. Yes Nancy. Not the most "family" oriented sim in the game. Anyway, Nancy is pregnant and that is a surprising and fun twist to the game. My two sims are acquainted with the Landgraabs but why would Geoffrey or Nancy call my sim to ask if they should get pregnant? I mean do you see the absurdity of that? Maybe not. What would their decision to get pregnant have to do with my sims? That is how "story progression" works. Sims living, loving, divorcing, making babies. That's the whole point. It would be like a neighbor of mine that I met in passing at the block party calling me to ask if they should have a baby.

Another example in the same save, is a few sim days ago Bjorn and Clara Bjergsen got divorced. I would not have expected that. And Bjorn is romantically involved with the pizza delivery lady, LOL. Poor Clara. An example of real "story progression." Again, why on earth would Bjorn call my sim to ask him if he should leave his wife? Or my sim call Bjorn to tell HIM to leave his wife? Nothing but an absurdity is this new system of "stories." Story progression should be sims going about their sim lives. That's what enriches the game. That's what makes the game interesting. Not random phone calls. Sheesh.

Except that a lot of people don’t like or want MCCC or S3 story progression in their game. Yes, I know. The Magic Word “toggle”. But it’s been indicated that the number of toggles in S3 contributed to that game’s instability, so the devs are trying to bring in a type of story progression with player control through in game action.

I really don’t mind that this only affects the sims my sims know. I don’t really care if other households make changes. And I think it’s nice that we are given a choice before any changes happen. Otherwise it might ruin the plans I have for marrying certain sims or seeing how a couple’s kids would end up. I like being consulted about this stuff. It will be even better when we can mark certain households off-limits, because I would rarely or never approve a change within the households I play.

There are some core relationship issues that I wish would get fixed which would allow us even more control over who gets to call us about their life choices or the other sims involved in those decisions:

Let us remove sims from the relationship panel. Other sims butt into my conversations and I don’t want to know them. Then they end up being friends with my sims somehow while I’m playing other households. I don’t want them calling me for advice. Relationship Culling often makes my sim forget they even knew people- give us the choice on who to cull. It’s not as if they have dozens of acquaintances - there should at least be a limit there if anyone is to be culled, ever. But I‘ve seen culling occur and they know just 3 other sims that are in their own household. That’s so unnecessary. Meanwhile, my small children are upset because someone apparently died who they had no business knowing. I want to remove these weird relationships when I see them.

Relationship Culling has destroyed the relationships around me in households I wasn’t playing. I want those maintained so that Rashidah Watson can one day ask me if she should say yes to a proposal from Rahul Chopra. Or Kaori Nishidake from Kitoshi Ito. Or Siobhan Fyres from Sergio Romeo. Unless I mark them as “played” immediately at the start of a game, it’s like they never knew each other.

"cyncie;c-18020250" wrote:
Except that a lot of people don’t like or want MCCC or S3 story progression in their game. Yes, I know. The Magic Word “toggle”. But it’s been indicated that the number of toggles in S3 contributed to that game’s instability, so the devs are trying to bring in a type of story progression with player control through in game action.

I can't imagine why toggles would inherently lead to instability in a computer program, that sounds like a design problem. They already have tons of them and they keep coming: packs. Of many sizes.

Why they are using the drama nodes feature I don't know, which seem to be in desperate need of actually working filters/tests that many other parts of the game have. Like how many times have people complained of phone calls not filtering for sims and relationships between them properly? And then there are reports that's happening with the stories prompts too. Go figure.

It seems like the route they have chosen would be unnecessarily hard to turn off on a global level. Maybe they were supposed to figure it out without reaching out to a gameplay engineer or something (or it was pitched as something easy-ish to do "because we can use an existing system"?), but this neighborhood stories thing should probably be its own system and tuning type, so it can be easily turned on or off (or blocked or whatever) and so it won't suffer from the same problems that have plagued the phone calls system for I don't know how long. It seems like their choice here has to lead to that separation or a serious look at the entire phone call system.

If I'm being charitable, maybe doing it through the phone system is just for prototyping to get a feel for how people react to the general concept, but if so, they should have been upfront about that.

"ModerateOsprey;c-18017588" wrote:
I have mentioned this before in the dim and distant past, and it is very unlikely it will be done, but the game needs an overhaul of the options altogether.

Many complex simulation type games such as Crusader Kings have very deep game setup options, where game parameters can be adjusted with either selecting values or in some cases sliders so the player can balance the game to their taste by selecting the severity of some mechanics or disabling them altogether. Of course a player has the option of ignoring these altogether.

In addition, many options are provided on the main HUD of these type of games - autonomy and aging options would be excellent candidates for this in Sims 4, IMO.

Mods like MCCC go a long way towards alleviating this problem in Sims 4 and would not be surprised to see the option to disable neighbourhood stories in that mod.

However, mods don't help the console player. I have not played the console version so not even sure those players can set 'testingcheats', so the option to disable should certainly be provided if just for those players - also lob in a few cheats for them for good measure :) Perfect for the new DRM - er, I mean Smart Delivery. I suspect in many cases console players would appreciate more game options rather than a new coat once in a while

I play on the pc, but don’t us CC or mods. I want to be able to turn SP off in my rotational saves. I don’t want to be forced to get a mod to do it. I don’t feel comfortable using mods.

"Triplis;c-18020286" wrote:

"cyncie;c-18020250" wrote:
Except that a lot of people don’t like or want MCCC or S3 story progression in their game. Yes, I know. The Magic Word “toggle”. But it’s been indicated that the number of toggles in S3 contributed to that game’s instability, so the devs are trying to bring in a type of story progression with player control through in game action.

I can't imagine why toggles would inherently lead to instability in a computer program, that sounds like a design problem. They already have tons of them and they keep coming: packs. Of many sizes.

Why they are using the drama nodes feature I don't know, which seem to be in desperate need of actually working filters/tests that many other parts of the game have. Like how many times have people complained of phone calls not filtering for sims and relationships between them properly? And then there are reports that's happening with the stories prompts too. Go figure.

It seems like the route they have chosen would be unnecessarily hard to turn off on a global level. Maybe they were supposed to figure it out without reaching out to a gameplay engineer or something (or it was pitched as something easy-ish to do "because we can use an existing system"?), but this neighborhood stories thing should probably be its own system and tuning type, so it can be easily turned on or off (or blocked or whatever) and so it won't suffer from the same problems that have plagued the phone calls system for I don't know how long. It seems like their choice here has to lead to that separation or a serious look at the entire phone call system.

If I'm being charitable, maybe doing it through the phone system is just for prototyping to get a feel for how people react to the general concept, but if so, they should have been upfront about that.

This seems to be the way they update some features now. In steps. I think that is asking quite a lot from players to use not fully supported features in their saves for several months.

If I had to guess, the reason why they are doing it in steps is because they want figure it out how it can work best with the game's architecture. This is probably because they have to think long-term for everything. Modders have seen in the code that it looks like there is more to the likes/dislikes system for example so they will probably do more with that in the future.

And this is also probably because the game is 7 years old now and a new story progression system would have to be compatible with 40+ packs, so working with an existing system, the phone system makes it a bit more feasible to implement.

But with that comes other problems because the phone system is so integrated into the game, they are going to have to figure out how to make the game work without it if people want toggles for specific story progression things now. But they said that will come in a future update so they will probably find a way to do it.

Maybe we will see an update to the phone in 2022 or 2023.

"Sharonia;c-18019623" wrote:

"83bienchen;c-18019608" wrote:

"Sharonia;c-18019465" wrote:
I’ve seen that toddlers get asked questions via the phone. Please I hope they will fix this system so that it makes sense.

I don't know where you saw that but in the code, all of these calles are disabled for toddlers.

I saw it on twitter earlier today...
https://twitter.com/prixiepae/status/1467683965557358592

Yep, I got that one during the weekend as well. The father of my sim’s toddler called to ask her if he should try for a promotion (more work but also more money and prestige). What made it extra weird apart from the fact that he called this toddler to ask about this, is that he’s a firefighter (which is the reason I haven’t moved him in with them) and I didn’t think npc jobs had the option to get promoted. Now I didn’t have the heart for the tot to not have any faith in her dad, so I had her answer that he should go for it, but now I’m dreading if that decision will affect the likelihood of him staying a firefighter :D

For those interested, my neighborhoodstories mod is officially out now:
https://deichschafblog.de/bienchen/autonomie-mods-autonomy-mods/