Neighborhood stories; sims are out of control

countrygirl516 · June 2022

Ever since neighborhood stories was introduced my neighbor sims have been over the top. I absolutely loved the idea of this addition to the game, but have been struggling with it after its introduction. I have had a ridiculous amount of households adopting kids (don't get me wrong, irl that's awesome!), but to the point where their entire household is filled with kids, even if there is only one adult. I have over 14 households filled with random kids! Same with other households and pets (also great irl). The issue I'm having is that it's so over the top and it only took a week in sims time for this to happen. On top of that, other sims have been dying left and right more than I ever remember in previous sims. Every couple days I check neighborhood stories at the mailbox I find that at least 2-3 sims have died and they're often my households friends. I have the normal amount of households in my neighborhoods and they're being overwhelmed by little creatures or killed to be replaced by dozens of randoms that my sims have to make friends with to make up for all the ones they've lost in some accident.

Needless to say I altered neighborhood stories in the manage worlds menu, but I hate having to turn off certain options altogether or go through household by household to decide who can be affected. I'd prefer I can leave it on, but have the system less over the top.

Please share if anyone else has been having this issue or if there is some bug that can be fixed

FanPhoria · June 2022

Yeah, agree with this. I think one of the main aspects where MCCC still has the edge in story progression vs what's been put into the actual game is the ability to set percentages and thus control the frequency of various things depending on how much chaos you actually want, rather than just having is as on "on or off" thing. To accomplish anything similar in the game as is without mods requires A LOT of micro-managing--you basically have to go in and turn each aspect on and off for specific households, and KEEP doing this over and over (so, like, notice that a household has a adopted a child, so then set that household's "adopt" option to off for a while, then decide later if you want to turn it on again for that specific household, and do that for literally everything in every household in the game)--which, just based on my own experience, can quickly become overwhelming and lead to giving up entirely and just turning off a lot of the stories options and downloading MCCC again lol.

countrygirl516 · June 2022

FanPhoria wrote: »

Yeah, agree with this. I think one of the main aspects where MCCC still has the edge in story progression vs what's been put into the actual game is the ability to set percentages and thus control the frequency of various things depending on how much chaos you actually want, rather than just having is as on "on or off" thing. To accomplish anything similar in the game as is without mods requires A LOT of micro-managing--you basically have to go in and turn each aspect on and off for specific households, and KEEP doing this over and over (so, like, notice that a household has a adopted a child, so then set that household's "adopt" option to off for a while, then decide later if you want to turn it on again for that specific household, and do that for literally everything in every household in the game)--which, just based on my own experience, can quickly become overwhelming and lead to giving up entirely and just turning off a lot of the stories options and downloading MCCC again lol.

Couldn't have put it better myself!

DKguruArtist · June 2022

Maybe adding some triggers would help reduce it, like adding options to "ask/talk about family" would maybe trigger npc to call once or twice about family advice like marriage or having new baby. Maybe if asking talking about pets(could be added option with cats and dogs for all) would cause them to ponder or ask about adopting cat or dog, maybe asking about love live would cause npc to ask for dating advice once or few times. So it feels more organic than just coming out blue with random calls all the time for neighborhood progression stories.

Jade47 · July 2022

In my first game with Neighborhood Stories my sim became best friends with Bella Goth who started to constantly call at least twice a day to ask if she should have another baby. At first my reaction was "sure, go for it Bella". When it happened again my sim was usually sleeping so I just clicked something at random to dismiss the message. My sim visited the Goth home a bit later and they had five screaming babies all in cots in Bella's room. Bella was out and Mortimer seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The poor man couldn't cope and when my sim made the mistake of offering a shoulder for him to cry on he started visiting her house regularly and trying it on romantically. I guess he didn't like how things were at home. It was hilarious drama that one time, but for any long term play the whole system is a poorly though out menace and best left switched off imho.

Yeayawn · July 2022

I agree. It's a mess. My main sim I'd been building stats etc for over 2 years -and her husband and sister- died the first day of this release. SO, I lose 3 main players I use, as they were coming back from a trip to Baatu. Initially I had no understanding of what happened because I'd been playing a different family when it happened. I had to dig to find the death notification. My notifications said 2 of them died from laughing to death, and the sister died from anger. This is just bizarre (and not a "fact of life" as you've stated the sexual orientation patch is). Not only that, but there was only one urn left behind to resurrect in the wishing well. My only recourse was to recreate the dead sims. I had saved while fixing part of a different build before I realized what had even happened. So these sims died while I wasn't playing them. Sorry, but this patch needs some serious rework before activating it, and a warning of some sort would've been nice. Otherwise, I wouldn't have checked that box. Since then, I've deactivated the majority of this update mechanics because it's a largely out of control mechanism with UNREALISTIC commands.

crebo19 · July 2022

I feel ya. Many of my sim families have either a bunch of random adopted babies and pets. I usually play them so I can age the babies up to see if they are attractive lol

SkipInkling · July 2022

There are SO MANY households with multiple babies in them in my neighborhoods. I think the Goths currently have three infants. Not toddlers or kids...infants. I've had to go in and disable a lot of the options for every sim/household, because the tidal wave of Simlings was overwhelming.

Violetta · August 2022

I ended up just turning neighborhood stories off. At first all the townies and randomly generated sims were being killed off in droves, then I turned off accidental deaths, then all the households started filling up with babies, toddlers, and pets. Which would be fine if there weren't multiple households with 1 adult sim and random mixes of 7 toddlers/pets. Then households with a ton of kids would randomly decide to move out of their house and just be homeless usually.

It's like most of the new features lately (neighborhood stories, wants and fears, lifestyles if you have SE, likes/dislikes) seemed like good ideas, but were just done poorly and never seem to get worked on again. I'd rather they now take the time to make these things better than working on the next "feature" they're only going to half finish before they throw it into the game. I actually do like the likes/dislikes, but it still could have been better.

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Neighborhood stories; sims are out of control

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