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Are NPC invitations still a thing?

plumboy23plumboy23 Posts: 128 Member
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. It was so nice when you got promoted and a friend invite you to a restaurant to celebrate it.

Comments

  • JustinB113JustinB113 Posts: 1,050 Member
    I’m getting invitations but it’s not to the things it used to be. HSY social stuff seems to dominate my game mostly. I don’t know if that’s because it’s newer and they toned everything else down to compensate.
  • mightyspritemightysprite Posts: 5,808 Member
    edited March 2023
    I've been getting a lot of the Neighborhood Stories invites when someone has a baby or adopts, or gets a pet. An occasional date invitation. And yes the San Myshuno festivals always have one invite call every time the festival occurs. But I'm getting way fewer of the other invitations.
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  • GreylingGreyling Posts: 163 Member
    edited March 2023
    plumboy23 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 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.
  • ravynwolvfravynwolvf Posts: 1,073 Member
    edited March 2023
    I've made a lot of mods to stop phone calls...there are way too many "Should I go out with..", "Are you prepared?", "Do you want to leave your high paying job to become a criminal?", etc, etc. But the ones where you got invited to someone's house I didn't touch. And they never happen. And they were the best ones, because they brought your sim someplace new, at random. I've said it before; each game pack that comes out kills something off in favor of its own mechanics. It should just add variety to gameplay but it doesn't. It's more like "Eco Living! Time for everyone to wear bags, play with clay, and flirt with everything that moves." Then it's "High School! With fears! (and wants, but they hardly count). Now all your sims can be angry or sad about something!" but not so much bags, clay and flirting, because that's been toned down. Right now, it's "Families! And their dynamics. It's all about how everyone gets along, or doesn't. And fighting over who going to change and bathe the infants. Again and again." And fears are toned down, or at the least you can properly turn them off. By now, we should have a really interesting game with everything that's been added, but it doesn't feel like it.
    The best game play to me (in any kind of game) is the unexpected. That hardly ever happens in the sims. You have to make things happen.
  • MoonCrossWarrior22MoonCrossWarrior22 Posts: 719 Member
    edited March 2023
    I have noticed that I have not been getting invited to rave parties/ going to restaurants like how I use to, I was like "LUL wat happened?" :o

    oh and birthday calls too. :O
    If you are interested in challenges; check out the Reincarnation challenge right at this link! here! | If you want spectator mode; go to this link. (for sims 3) here
  • RapidRabidRabbitRapidRabidRabbit Posts: 134 Member
    I miss them so much too, especially the Get Together raves! They were so much fun and I loved having my party animal sims go out and let loose. Idk why on earth they got rid of this feature. It just spices up the gameplay and encourages you to leave your lot.
  • JustMeAlbJustMeAlb Posts: 371 Member
    Use to complain about them and now I miss them, especially the Get Together ones.
    The cake is a lie
  • Lucy_HenleyLucy_Henley Posts: 2,943 Member
    edited March 2023
    Whenever I got a “shall we go out tonight?” phone call from someone, it was always 10am (or similar) and they’d go to the location instantly. Sometimes it’d be to a party or whatever, but there’d be no-one there. So it’d be pointless.
  • ravynwolvfravynwolvf Posts: 1,073 Member
    Drama nodes are complicated (that's what those invites, phone call, etc are run by). They have certain days of the week and times they go off on. The one where a sim invites you to hang out at their house for example runs every day, from 10am to 8pm. But there's a bunch of them running at once, and it feels like they all have a random chance of some kind of happening, but only one at a time (or even per day; I don't know how that works). It's still in there; it just doesn't go off underneath all the other cr, er junk that's happening at the same time.
  • BabykittyjadeBabykittyjade Posts: 4,975 Member
    @Greyling I couldn't agree more🥲🥲🥲🥲
    It's very frustrating they removed that feature from get together. I use to love those invites and never thought it was too much. I just clicked no when I was too busy but I knew I would get another one.
    Zombies, oh please oh please give us zombies!! :'(
  • BabykittyjadeBabykittyjade Posts: 4,975 Member
    I miss them so much too, especially the Get Together raves! They were so much fun and I loved having my party animal sims go out and let loose. Idk why on earth they got rid of this feature. It just spices up the gameplay and encourages you to leave your lot.

    They got rid it because of people complaining they were tired of the invites and phone calls ☠
    Zombies, oh please oh please give us zombies!! :'(
  • WildIrishBansheeWildIrishBanshee Posts: 2,104 Member
    Circus is definitely still around, my sim just got an invite to it. I've gotten a few rave invites too, but they are pretty rare. Usually it's festivals, jobs and a few other things.
  • Admiral8QAdmiral8Q Posts: 3,303 Member
    @Greyling I couldn't agree more🥲🥲🥲🥲
    It's very frustrating they removed that feature from get together. I use to love those invites and never thought it was too much. I just clicked no when I was too busy but I knew I would get another one.

    THIS ^^
    I agree. Although it may feel 'annoying' at times, there is no penalty to not do it. :)
    Reticulating Splines...
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