Autonomous flirty behavior came with this update in order to allow autonomous promposal in EP12 High School Years.
It reminds me Neighborhood Stories also tries romance and engagement with married sims.
Yes, but why is it only happening with same sex attracted sims that have been designated that way in CAS? Why isn't it effecting sims in heterosexual relationships and/or sims who haven't been designated as being same sex attracted (and not interested in experimenting or exploring). Autonomous flirty behaviour is one thing, but when it appears to target only those sims who are non heterosexually identified and also appears to completely ignore relationship status, that is a major problem to me.
Occult Simmer (All Occult All The Time)
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
Is there potentially a bug with this update? If so where can it be reported? I mentioned my disappointment about this in another thread, but I've gone through and set all my playable sims to what I want their respective sexualities to be, as well as made sure the 'no exploration' box was ticked. My Bi, Lesbian and Gay sims, who are all in long term relationships with most also married, have started flirting up a storm and propositioning Sims for dates, regardless of their a) set sexual preference, and b) regardless of their relationships status. This was not something that was generally happening before the update. In contrast my Sims who are set to a heterosexual preference and/or who have not had their sexuality defined in CAS are behaving as before without the rampant over flirting and propositioning of other sims.
There is a bug report section on the forum that links to a separate site to report bugs. You can also list in feedback assuming it's not a bug (but I imagine it is, as I'm under the impression High School Years introduced a lot of autonomy bugs).
As someone said, the autonomy for flirting was increased for HSY and probably just isn't completely coded to consider the proper orientation flags in place (I know that's the case for social bunny stuff if that wasn't fixed yet).
Honestly, I kind of feel like the orientation update shouldve come either way before HSY or sometime after in order to properly fine tune it (bugs were bound to happen, let's be real). And the HSY patch itself broke a ton of parts of the game (plus the bugs in HSY as a whole). So this may be something on the backburner or may be something that they just didn't catch and could use reporting/feedback.
I have seen screenshots of sims rejecting (at least player controlled) sims who don't meet their orientation flags so it does recognize the orientations at some points. But autonomy may be needing more fine tuning.
IRL, people may not know who they are attracted to. Some may not be attracted to anyone at all (asexual). Some may want a romance but are not interested in the woohoo. This was one of the great things about the old Sims 2 attraction system: you could be interested or not interested in hair color, body size, alien/not alien, vampire/not vampire, perfume, makeup, career levels, and/or skill levels. Tall or short attraction could also be a thing. Or a personality trait or wealth could be a thing. It was not based on gender, since that part was all player directed if I remember correctly. But that could potentially factor into it, not just exclusively.
These are only personal preferences, and there is no need to add judgment to any of these. Love is love. Just like judging which foods your friends eat does not usually make sense. Some people place value judgments on food. You can choose which foods to eat, but you do not have to judge your own food, and you don't have to try to make other people eat things they don't like, or even things they may be allergic to, or just foods that they don't like the look of or smell of. Like sexuality, allergies are not something that can just be changed with effort either.
You can also like the look or smell of a food, but not choose to eat it. Or, you can choose to eat it. Unless there is an allergy or medical condition, it is simply illogical to tell someone that they are never allowed to eat a food they like. Love is a basic human need, as is food.
I have been playing The Sims since 2001, when Livin Large came out. My avatar deliberately looks like Chris Roomies from TS1.
Is there potentially a bug with this update? If so where can it be reported? I mentioned my disappointment about this in another thread, but I've gone through and set all my playable sims to what I want their respective sexualities to be, as well as made sure the 'no exploration' box was ticked. My Bi, Lesbian and Gay sims, who are all in long term relationships with most also married, have started flirting up a storm and propositioning Sims for dates, regardless of their a) set sexual preference, and b) regardless of their relationships status. This was not something that was generally happening before the update. In contrast my Sims who are set to a heterosexual preference and/or who have not had their sexuality defined in CAS are behaving as before without the rampant over flirting and propositioning of other sims.
There is a bug report section on the forum that links to a separate site to report bugs. You can also list in feedback assuming it's not a bug (but I imagine it is, as I'm under the impression High School Years introduced a lot of autonomy bugs).
As someone said, the autonomy for flirting was increased for HSY and probably just isn't completely coded to consider the proper orientation flags in place (I know that's the case for social bunny stuff if that wasn't fixed yet).
Honestly, I kind of feel like the orientation update shouldve come either way before HSY or sometime after in order to properly fine tune it (bugs were bound to happen, let's be real). And the HSY patch itself broke a ton of parts of the game (plus the bugs in HSY as a whole). So this may be something on the backburner or may be something that they just didn't catch and could use reporting/feedback.
I have seen screenshots of sims rejecting (at least player controlled) sims who don't meet their orientation flags so it does recognize the orientations at some points. But autonomy may be needing more fine tuning.
Thanks. I'm going to start a test game, without mods, populate it with several couples of differing sexual preferences & see if it still happens. Right now I'm only using MCCC plus 2 mods to make Grim a playable character, so I didn't think those would effect anything relationship wise. Just to make sure though I'll run a clean game save and see if I get the same sorts of things happening.
Occult Simmer (All Occult All The Time)
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
After two weeks of waiting for more fixes I started a new save today (don't want to touch my legacy save right now) and was looking for a partner for my Sim. But this was basically impossible, since almost all townies were set to be aro/ace and not exploring. Not all of them but the vast majority.
I tested again in a new save without mods and with localthumbcache deleted but there is still an extreme amount of aro/aco/no exploring Sims. This just does not make sense and makes it impossible to use townies as a dating pool.
But I'm also confused and surprised that there are not that many "me toos" on the bug. Don't you have this problem? Or do you just not date townies so that the problem does not occur?
@flauschtrud I'm not having that issue. The random townies in my game are mostly default pan. I don't allow romance between my sims and randoms. I have no problem with them dating or becoming romantic with townies, but I only want it to happen with my townies. That said I did go in and check 10 random townies and all of them were romantically exploring and interested in woohoo with both genders. Half of them had no romantic preference and the other half had the opposite gender selected as their romantic preference.
@flauschtrud I'm not having that issue. The random townies in my game are mostly default pan. I don't allow romance between my sims and randoms. I have no problem with them dating or becoming romantic with townies, but I only want it to happen with my townies. That said I did go in and check 10 random townies and all of them were romantically exploring and interested in woohoo with both genders. Half of them had no romantic preference and the other half had the opposite gender selected as their romantic preference.
Have you played a same sex couple in this save? I investigated a little and this seems to influence the way townies sexuality is set. At least for single Sims. The married townies that the game generates seem to have fitting orientations.
My main couple are lesbians and they are engaged and their relationship was already established before the update. The patch didn't change their behavior or orientation. I also use Chingyu's faithfulness mod and that combination has prevented any unwanted flirting. I did have a random try to flirt but he got shot down in flames immediately. I can't say if it was the update, mod, or both that did that.
My main couple are lesbians and they are engaged and their relationship was already established before the update. The patch didn't change their behavior or orientation. I also use Chingyu's faithfulness mod and that combination has prevented any unwanted flirting. I did have a random try to flirt but he got shot down in flames immediately. I can't say if it was the update, mod, or both that did that.
There seem to be many factors: Townies in old saves are fine (they are all exploring + bisexual), but newly generated townies after the patch have an extremely high chance of being aro/ace + not exploring (unless they are generated as part of a couple). OR if the player actively initiates same sex romance the game will switch to diverse settings (this really sucks, this should be the default otherwise it is only a hidden switch to not offend homephobes... ).
But there definitely seems to be a bug, I wrote more about it here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/OPEN-Townies-with-no-Sexual-Orientation-at-all/m-p/11735371/highlight/true#M228240
"Again, that's why this game has always been so important to me. Now, I just don't know what's going to happen. I feel like I'm once again going to be excluded by this inclusivity."
Isn't that always the way? Pretty soon we are going to all be in a little box all by ourselves because our very uniqueness will define us to the point where it eliminates everyone else.
As long as this doesn't prevent me from having straight sims then I'll be happy.
If anything, it will allow you to have straight sims lol. You couldn't really do it before.
Sims by their nature are pansexual.
That's what I always thought. Since first playing Sims 2 I never felt there were limitations on sexual orientation in the Sims. You were free to have your sims be with whoever they wanted to be with. I've had gay couples, straight couples and sims that were with both and there was never a problem. So I guess I don't understand why the development team needed to spend time on this when there were other things they could have been spending time on. We already had it.
"Again, that's why this game has always been so important to me. Now, I just don't know what's going to happen. I feel like I'm once again going to be excluded by this inclusivity."
Isn't that always the way? Pretty soon we are going to all be in a little box all by ourselves because our very uniqueness will define us to the point where it eliminates everyone else.
That's what I always thought. Since first playing Sims 2 I never felt there were limitations on sexual orientation in the Sims. You were free to have your sims be with whoever they wanted to be with. I've had gay couples, straight couples and sims that were with both and there was never a problem. So I guess I don't understand why the development team needed to spend time on this when there were other things they could have been spending time on. We already had it.
We already pansexual sims, but we never truly had straight or gay sims that stayed faithful to their orientation. It could always flip at anytime even if we wanted them to stick to that orientation. Even the pan sims could flip to straight or gay if they got romantic with one gender more than the other enough times. They can't now, because this feature allows us to define each sim's sexuality as broadly or narrowly as we want. It also frees us from having to babysit them so that they stick to the orientation we want. Whatever we choose pan, straight, gay, asexual they stay with that. I'm glad the development team took the time to create this. I love being able to create a sim that will stay true to the vision I had for them.
That's what I always thought. Since first playing Sims 2 I never felt there were limitations on sexual orientation in the Sims. You were free to have your sims be with whoever they wanted to be with. I've had gay couples, straight couples and sims that were with both and there was never a problem. So I guess I don't understand why the development team needed to spend time on this when there were other things they could have been spending time on. We already had it.
We already pansexual sims, but we never truly had straight or gay sims that stayed faithful to their orientation. It could always flip at anytime even if we wanted them to stick to that orientation. Even the pan sims could flip to straight or gay if they got romantic with one gender more than the other enough times. They can't now, because this feature allows us to define each sim's sexuality as broadly or narrowly as we want. It also frees us from having to babysit them so that they stick to the orientation we want. Whatever we choose pan, straight, gay, asexual they stay with that. I'm glad the development team took the time to create this. I love being able to create a sim that will stay true to the vision I had for them.
Serial Romantic - This Sim wants to play the field and go on all sorts of dates with people!
Soulmate - This Sim wants to find and live a rewarding life with "The One"!
Romantic: These Sims tend to be Flirty and may become Sad if they don't have any Romantic social interactions for a period of time.
Unflirty: These Sims get Tense around Flirty Sims and seldom get Flirty themselves. It's difficult for them to be Romantic in public.
Non-Committal: These Sims become Tense after a while in the same job or relationship, become Happy when they Quit a Job or Break Off a relationship, take longer to Propose, and can Discuss their Fear of Commitment.
Proper: These Sims tend to disapprove of other Sims' improper behavior such as Mean or Mischievous socials, but find themselves happier in Formal Outfits and have a much easier time with Friendly and Romantic socials.
Using these as a base they could have achieved the same result by tweaking these traits/aspirations. If a random sim hits on your sim, these should have guided how they responded to the interaction - sexual orientation of the sim didn't even need to enter into it. If they were going for realism we don't get to control who hits on us only how we respond. A Serial Romantic would be far more open to it than someone with the Soulmate aspiration. An Unflirty sim would not want any romantic interactions, a Proper sim who is in a relationship would not feel it proper to respond to a flirtation by a random sim as they aren't their partner and a Romantic sim might be open to it just for the sheer enjoyment of being romantic.
What they could have done was actually fix the Soulmate aspiration so that I didn't log into my game to find my sim with that aspiration in multiple romantic relationships than the one she was actually married to. Or the Free Love neighborhood action plan overriding those traits to allow for the inlaws to hit on their son's fiancé.
But it doesn't sound like it was meant to be what you said it was (which wouldn't have been a problem at all if the feature didn't already exist).
"As a team, we hold creativity, discovery, inclusivity and play as core values and strive every day to celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion for our people and community. With that in mind, we’re delighted to bring the Sexual Orientation feature to all Simmers. Between this update and the recent pronouns update, we’re taking several strides forward into being a game that respects and celebrates the nuance and color of everyday life.
It is important to acknowledge that these are steps in a journey that we are still mapping out. There is much further to go, and while I can’t get into the details of where exactly we go next, please know that we are committed to continuing to improve our representation of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Authenticity is a point that often comes up in regards to features like this, and rightly so. As such I’ll try to peel the curtain back a bit and speak to our efforts in making sure we got this right. Many members of the team, myself included, are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. That said, each one of us on the team represents only a narrow slice of lived experiences. As such we’ve worked extensively with GLAAD and the It Gets Better Project to ensure that we’ve captured the widest possible range of viewpoints on how to approach this feature in a manner that respects and elevates the community."
So as I said - it's like giving us the ability to sit in a chair we are already sitting in because we were never blocked from being LGBT in the Sims to make this kind of change necessary and it has been like that in every single version of the Sims since Sims 2 at least (I don't know about the Sims 1 because I didn't know about the Sims until that title was already discontinued). EA_Cade goes on to add this:
Can I turn this feature off?
No. While we try to give players the option to toggle certain gameplay features, LGBTQIA+ identities are a fact of life and not a toggle to be switched on and off.
It was never a feature that had a toggle because it was always an accepted part of the Sims games that there would be some LGBT sims. I know that I played several lesbian couples and was never blocked from doing so. This just feels different. And my question is: Why now? It's like being told we will now be able to sit in a chair that our sim is already sitting in and being asked to celebrate. Celebrate what? We could always do this. So like I said - why not just fix the aspirations and traits that would impact this. Because it's not going to stop those issues I mentioned above of people with the Soulmate trait being hit on and accepting the advances - it will just mean that it will only be one gender now instead. Which doesn't solve the problem.
EDITED TO ADD: It's the Freelancer career all over again. I could always have a sim in the writer career - why did players need the Freelancer version added? I don't often get annoyed with the things the dev team of this game does but this is a video game form of regifting. Don't give us multiple versions of the same thing and call it "new". It's not.
This addition kind of broke my game thanks to the way it added it. Now my sims cannot engage in any sort of romance. Even the lesbian/gay couples naturally in the game are breaking up. I really can't stand this patch because it just took my control away for the "sake of realism." They need to add a way to opt out or something. I honestly don't care how anyone else wants to play, but don't force someone who just wants to manipulate and control the stories how I want them to be stuck and unable to do it without having to jump between houses or cheat to add a relationship status.
TLDR: I've got 2 characters from different households I want to date, but even though they are both bi, (romantic for both and gender preference for both. Neither exploring.) they keep rejecting each other because they don't like the others gender. So I'm angry because my control of something was stripped post-purchase.
That's what I always thought. Since first playing Sims 2 I never felt there were limitations on sexual orientation in the Sims. You were free to have your sims be with whoever they wanted to be with. I've had gay couples, straight couples and sims that were with both and there was never a problem. So I guess I don't understand why the development team needed to spend time on this when there were other things they could have been spending time on. We already had it.
We already pansexual sims, but we never truly had straight or gay sims that stayed faithful to their orientation. It could always flip at anytime even if we wanted them to stick to that orientation. Even the pan sims could flip to straight or gay if they got romantic with one gender more than the other enough times. They can't now, because this feature allows us to define each sim's sexuality as broadly or narrowly as we want. It also frees us from having to babysit them so that they stick to the orientation we want. Whatever we choose pan, straight, gay, asexual they stay with that. I'm glad the development team took the time to create this. I love being able to create a sim that will stay true to the vision I had for them.
Yup! And it's for real life inclusion too. Defining your real-life orientation is a big topic these days and letting people put up specific guard rails to represent their preferences in game is really cool. The Heckings are a perfect example because while we know they're supposed to be a gay couple. They're also handsome male sims(which is rare) and it is all too tempting and easy to rush on over there and steal one away romantically for female sims. As more packs come out it'll be a lot of fun to meet new characters. As someone with a habit of 'introduce -> Brighten Day -> Get to Know -> Compliment Appearance' to get things going, I've faced a few rejection notices since this pack came out - so it's been fun to not get the expected results.
Yup! And it's for real life inclusion too. Defining your real-life orientation is a big topic these days and letting people put up specific guard rails to represent their preferences in game is really cool. The Heckings are a perfect example because while we know they're supposed to be a gay couple. They're also handsome male sims(which is rare) and it is all too tempting and easy to rush on over there and steal one away romantically for female sims. As more packs come out it'll be a lot of fun to meet new characters. As someone with a habit of 'introduce -> Brighten Day -> Get to Know -> Compliment Appearance' to get things going, I've faced a few rejection notices since this pack came out - so it's been fun to not get the expected results.
The Heckings are a great example. I've always seen them as settled on who they are, and as a committed couple. And then to see one of them suddenly appear dating a woman just ruins their story. Now I can stop that and I love it. I've had too many same sex couples switch orientations simply because of a couple of random flirt sessions, and vice versa. The ability to lock them into gay, lesbian, straight, pan, whatever we envision for them is so wonderful.
What I find weird and I don't know if it is just me or a bug or what, but I had a child sim grow up into a teenager and I was completely unable to change anything with her preferences. I even opened up the CAS full edit cheat thinking that would help but I got the message that it was unable to change anything on already created sims. I tried again when they aged up to a young adult. Still didn't work. It was totally greyed out and locked up. No mods at all on that save.
Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of the plotline of teenagers growing up and learning about who they are?
What I find weird and I don't know if it is just me or a bug or what, but I had a child sim grow up into a teenager and I was completely unable to change anything with her preferences. I even opened up the CAS full edit cheat thinking that would help but I got the message that it was unable to change anything on already created sims. I tried again when they aged up to a young adult. Still didn't work. It was totally greyed out and locked up. No mods at all on that save.
Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of the plotline of teenagers growing up and learning about who they are?
I have seen that message at random times for a year or more. I play with aging off and I will get that on rare occasions when I go to age a sim up. I can usually clear it by exiting CAS and trying again. If that doesn't work the next thing I try is exiting to the main menu and when I go back in it's cleared.
Hi @Keijra try going into CAS through the mirror. For me the option to change preferences shows up there, but not when entering CAS through the traits panel.
I think it also shows up when entering CAS through the household manager.
Thanks goodness for this update. I think everyone wanted very much. Also, If anyone can figure out how to stop santa calling you every day would be nice too..
Comments
Yes, but why is it only happening with same sex attracted sims that have been designated that way in CAS? Why isn't it effecting sims in heterosexual relationships and/or sims who haven't been designated as being same sex attracted (and not interested in experimenting or exploring). Autonomous flirty behaviour is one thing, but when it appears to target only those sims who are non heterosexually identified and also appears to completely ignore relationship status, that is a major problem to me.
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
There is a bug report section on the forum that links to a separate site to report bugs. You can also list in feedback assuming it's not a bug (but I imagine it is, as I'm under the impression High School Years introduced a lot of autonomy bugs).
As someone said, the autonomy for flirting was increased for HSY and probably just isn't completely coded to consider the proper orientation flags in place (I know that's the case for social bunny stuff if that wasn't fixed yet).
Honestly, I kind of feel like the orientation update shouldve come either way before HSY or sometime after in order to properly fine tune it (bugs were bound to happen, let's be real). And the HSY patch itself broke a ton of parts of the game (plus the bugs in HSY as a whole). So this may be something on the backburner or may be something that they just didn't catch and could use reporting/feedback.
I have seen screenshots of sims rejecting (at least player controlled) sims who don't meet their orientation flags so it does recognize the orientations at some points. But autonomy may be needing more fine tuning.
These are only personal preferences, and there is no need to add judgment to any of these. Love is love. Just like judging which foods your friends eat does not usually make sense. Some people place value judgments on food. You can choose which foods to eat, but you do not have to judge your own food, and you don't have to try to make other people eat things they don't like, or even things they may be allergic to, or just foods that they don't like the look of or smell of. Like sexuality, allergies are not something that can just be changed with effort either.
You can also like the look or smell of a food, but not choose to eat it. Or, you can choose to eat it. Unless there is an allergy or medical condition, it is simply illogical to tell someone that they are never allowed to eat a food they like. Love is a basic human need, as is food.
Thanks. I'm going to start a test game, without mods, populate it with several couples of differing sexual preferences & see if it still happens. Right now I'm only using MCCC plus 2 mods to make Grim a playable character, so I didn't think those would effect anything relationship wise. Just to make sure though I'll run a clean game save and see if I get the same sorts of things happening.
Female Simmer from Australia (she/her)
I had one of my Sims marry the Grim Reaper & now they have a lot of kids.
After two weeks of waiting for more fixes I started a new save today (don't want to touch my legacy save right now) and was looking for a partner for my Sim. But this was basically impossible, since almost all townies were set to be aro/ace and not exploring. Not all of them but the vast majority.
I tested again in a new save without mods and with localthumbcache deleted but there is still an extreme amount of aro/aco/no exploring Sims. This just does not make sense and makes it impossible to use townies as a dating pool.
But I'm also confused and surprised that there are not that many "me toos" on the bug. Don't you have this problem? Or do you just not date townies so that the problem does not occur?
My first attempt at creating a Sims comic: The Parker-Goth Legacy.
Have you played a same sex couple in this save? I investigated a little and this seems to influence the way townies sexuality is set. At least for single Sims. The married townies that the game generates seem to have fitting orientations.
My first attempt at creating a Sims comic: The Parker-Goth Legacy.
I don't have this issue.
I used "Show/Search Sim Info Mod" to check my game, no random NPC has "NotExploring" trait.
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The Sims 4 General DiscussionThere seem to be many factors: Townies in old saves are fine (they are all exploring + bisexual), but newly generated townies after the patch have an extremely high chance of being aro/ace + not exploring (unless they are generated as part of a couple). OR if the player actively initiates same sex romance the game will switch to diverse settings (this really sucks, this should be the default otherwise it is only a hidden switch to not offend homephobes...
But there definitely seems to be a bug, I wrote more about it here: https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/OPEN-Townies-with-no-Sexual-Orientation-at-all/m-p/11735371/highlight/true#M228240
My first attempt at creating a Sims comic: The Parker-Goth Legacy.
"Again, that's why this game has always been so important to me. Now, I just don't know what's going to happen. I feel like I'm once again going to be excluded by this inclusivity."
Isn't that always the way? Pretty soon we are going to all be in a little box all by ourselves because our very uniqueness will define us to the point where it eliminates everyone else.
That's what I always thought. Since first playing Sims 2 I never felt there were limitations on sexual orientation in the Sims. You were free to have your sims be with whoever they wanted to be with. I've had gay couples, straight couples and sims that were with both and there was never a problem. So I guess I don't understand why the development team needed to spend time on this when there were other things they could have been spending time on. We already had it.
How so?
We already pansexual sims, but we never truly had straight or gay sims that stayed faithful to their orientation. It could always flip at anytime even if we wanted them to stick to that orientation. Even the pan sims could flip to straight or gay if they got romantic with one gender more than the other enough times. They can't now, because this feature allows us to define each sim's sexuality as broadly or narrowly as we want. It also frees us from having to babysit them so that they stick to the orientation we want. Whatever we choose pan, straight, gay, asexual they stay with that. I'm glad the development team took the time to create this. I love being able to create a sim that will stay true to the vision I had for them.
Serial Romantic - This Sim wants to play the field and go on all sorts of dates with people!
Soulmate - This Sim wants to find and live a rewarding life with "The One"!
Romantic: These Sims tend to be Flirty and may become Sad if they don't have any Romantic social interactions for a period of time.
Unflirty: These Sims get Tense around Flirty Sims and seldom get Flirty themselves. It's difficult for them to be Romantic in public.
Non-Committal: These Sims become Tense after a while in the same job or relationship, become Happy when they Quit a Job or Break Off a relationship, take longer to Propose, and can Discuss their Fear of Commitment.
Proper: These Sims tend to disapprove of other Sims' improper behavior such as Mean or Mischievous socials, but find themselves happier in Formal Outfits and have a much easier time with Friendly and Romantic socials.
Using these as a base they could have achieved the same result by tweaking these traits/aspirations. If a random sim hits on your sim, these should have guided how they responded to the interaction - sexual orientation of the sim didn't even need to enter into it. If they were going for realism we don't get to control who hits on us only how we respond. A Serial Romantic would be far more open to it than someone with the Soulmate aspiration. An Unflirty sim would not want any romantic interactions, a Proper sim who is in a relationship would not feel it proper to respond to a flirtation by a random sim as they aren't their partner and a Romantic sim might be open to it just for the sheer enjoyment of being romantic.
What they could have done was actually fix the Soulmate aspiration so that I didn't log into my game to find my sim with that aspiration in multiple romantic relationships than the one she was actually married to. Or the Free Love neighborhood action plan overriding those traits to allow for the inlaws to hit on their son's fiancé.
But it doesn't sound like it was meant to be what you said it was (which wouldn't have been a problem at all if the feature didn't already exist).
"As a team, we hold creativity, discovery, inclusivity and play as core values and strive every day to celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion for our people and community. With that in mind, we’re delighted to bring the Sexual Orientation feature to all Simmers. Between this update and the recent pronouns update, we’re taking several strides forward into being a game that respects and celebrates the nuance and color of everyday life.
It is important to acknowledge that these are steps in a journey that we are still mapping out. There is much further to go, and while I can’t get into the details of where exactly we go next, please know that we are committed to continuing to improve our representation of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Authenticity is a point that often comes up in regards to features like this, and rightly so. As such I’ll try to peel the curtain back a bit and speak to our efforts in making sure we got this right. Many members of the team, myself included, are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. That said, each one of us on the team represents only a narrow slice of lived experiences. As such we’ve worked extensively with GLAAD and the It Gets Better Project to ensure that we’ve captured the widest possible range of viewpoints on how to approach this feature in a manner that respects and elevates the community."
So as I said - it's like giving us the ability to sit in a chair we are already sitting in because we were never blocked from being LGBT in the Sims to make this kind of change necessary and it has been like that in every single version of the Sims since Sims 2 at least (I don't know about the Sims 1 because I didn't know about the Sims until that title was already discontinued). EA_Cade goes on to add this:
Can I turn this feature off?
No. While we try to give players the option to toggle certain gameplay features, LGBTQIA+ identities are a fact of life and not a toggle to be switched on and off.
It was never a feature that had a toggle because it was always an accepted part of the Sims games that there would be some LGBT sims. I know that I played several lesbian couples and was never blocked from doing so. This just feels different. And my question is: Why now? It's like being told we will now be able to sit in a chair that our sim is already sitting in and being asked to celebrate. Celebrate what? We could always do this. So like I said - why not just fix the aspirations and traits that would impact this. Because it's not going to stop those issues I mentioned above of people with the Soulmate trait being hit on and accepting the advances - it will just mean that it will only be one gender now instead. Which doesn't solve the problem.
EDITED TO ADD: It's the Freelancer career all over again. I could always have a sim in the writer career - why did players need the Freelancer version added? I don't often get annoyed with the things the dev team of this game does but this is a video game form of regifting. Don't give us multiple versions of the same thing and call it "new". It's not.
TLDR: I've got 2 characters from different households I want to date, but even though they are both bi, (romantic for both and gender preference for both. Neither exploring.) they keep rejecting each other because they don't like the others gender. So I'm angry because my control of something was stripped post-purchase.
Yup! And it's for real life inclusion too. Defining your real-life orientation is a big topic these days and letting people put up specific guard rails to represent their preferences in game is really cool. The Heckings are a perfect example because while we know they're supposed to be a gay couple. They're also handsome male sims(which is rare) and it is all too tempting and easy to rush on over there and steal one away romantically for female sims. As more packs come out it'll be a lot of fun to meet new characters. As someone with a habit of 'introduce -> Brighten Day -> Get to Know -> Compliment Appearance' to get things going, I've faced a few rejection notices since this pack came out - so it's been fun to not get the expected results.
The Heckings are a great example. I've always seen them as settled on who they are, and as a committed couple. And then to see one of them suddenly appear dating a woman just ruins their story. Now I can stop that and I love it. I've had too many same sex couples switch orientations simply because of a couple of random flirt sessions, and vice versa. The ability to lock them into gay, lesbian, straight, pan, whatever we envision for them is so wonderful.
Doesn't that completely defeat the purpose of the plotline of teenagers growing up and learning about who they are?
Did you write cas.fulleditmode before going to CAS ?
There is no issue in my game.
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The Sims 4 General DiscussionI have seen that message at random times for a year or more. I play with aging off and I will get that on rare occasions when I go to age a sim up. I can usually clear it by exiting CAS and trying again. If that doesn't work the next thing I try is exiting to the main menu and when I go back in it's cleared.
> @Keijra
>
> Did you write cas.fulleditmode before going to CAS ?
>
> There is no issue in my game.
Yes. I had full edit mode enabled and I could edit everything that you usually cannot (voice, age, skin, etc.) EXCEPT for sexual preferences.
I think it also shows up when entering CAS through the household manager.
Teens ignore the "Mess Around" preference if it doesn't match to the romance preference.
"Mess Around" partner is forbidden for teens.
The Sims 4 Ideas Corner
- 👕 [CAS] Male content | 💰 §1 Million Lifestyle | ♂️ Man lifestyle for The Sims | ♻️ Content from The Sims
- 🔨 [Build/Buy Mode] Ideas | 📱 Ideas from The Sims FreePlay | ✈️ Vacation : Gameplay update | 🥦 New meals
The Sims 4 General Discussion