Acquaintances making excessive calls/texts to our active sims have been bugging a lot of players, myself included. Some would reach out non-stop even though they had only met our sims once in some unimportant or accidental circumstances. Especially with Neighborhood Stories—a system that I mostly enjoy—these strangers will text our sims with the most illogical and unrealistic inquiries.
I’d like to propose a simple solution—a meaningful Exchange Numbers interaction.
Right now, we have that interaction under Romance, which only serves for story purposes because sims automatically get one another’s numbers upon meeting. Changing that into both friendly/romance interactions that has gameplay mechanics can greatly alleviates the excessive calls/texts that we have been experiencing.
In practice, two sims who have not exchanged numbers will not be able to call/text each other (yes, our sims won’t be able to call them either). This will ensure that our sims will not receive random invites from someone whom they have only met once or met because of gameplay reasons (NPC roles).
Of course, a few of the gameplay texts from several packs (i.e., vampire welcome, inheritance scam, marketing call, et cetera) would still happen since they are not necessarily triggered by known sims and will not cause our sims to be acquainted with them. Still, calls like club invites, hang out requests, dating invites, story progression questions should only happen between sims who have one another’s numbers.
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As an addition, maybe there could also be a function to ask for someone else's number? That could be a way, for instance, for sims to get in contact with other sims without necessarily "meeting" them. A parent could get the numbers of their kids friends, a kid could get the number of their friend's parents, sims who were dating could give their SO the contact info of their siblings or roommates, ect ect ect. (And then our sim could invite them over or throw an event with them on the guestlist without having to awkwardly stalk them and make introductions themselves lol.)
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