OfB Employee payments: How broken are they, exactly?
pbox:
This has been bugging me forever; I just tested it again and the payments do seem to be a great big mess the way Maxis have implemented the whole thing .. I'd like to know if it's perhaps just me or if it can be fixed/workarounded somehow?
Example scenario:
* Alice is unemployed, her funds are 4§ when I exit her lot;
* Bob hires Alice, paying her 100§ per hour;
* After playing Bob's business for one day (8 hours), his business expenses are -800;
* When opening Alice's home lot again, her funds are now 804§;
* Alice goes to work, returns home, popup: "Alice just came home from work, she earned 800§ today" -- her funds are now 1604§.
In other words, Alice is getting paid twice: once by Bob when playing his lot, once "from above" when playing her own lot. WTF? Where are those extra 800§ supposed to come from? Anyone else having the same issue?
I tried this with various combinations of business related hacks, including no hacks at all in an OfB-only test game .. the problem remains. The only thing I've never used is BRY. Using a "no payments" hack doesn't help, because they still get their nominal wage from nowhere upon returning home. Can this be eliminated somehow?
J. M. Pescado:
When a sim "goes to work" from his home lot, doing "no work" effectively, the money essentially comes from the ether. Money paid during actual WORK is deducted from your owning sim and paid to the employee sim. The lack of synchronous activity makes it somewhat vague how to resolve this: If the money paid for this "invisible" work comes directly out of the owning sim's pocket, he will be losing money while no profit is made because the employee does no actual work. Plus, what would happen when the owning sim runs out of money as a result of this, while absolutely no actual work has been performed? It's quite a quandary. Furthermore, hours worked at the actual business tend to have zero correlation to hours the ownable employee actually works. It's just a huge mess.
Proposals of what can be done are open to consideration, but I can't really think of a better, less messy way that doesn't just substitute one problem for another.
pbox:
Glad to hear it's not just me -- and I'm not seeing things :)
Quote from: J. M. Pescado
Furthermore, hours worked at the actual business tend to have zero correlation to hours the ownable employee actually works. It's just a huge mess.
Yes but that's a whole *other* mess isn't it? -- separate from the payments one .. this one I can at least understand, because the way Maxis screwed this up from the beginning, the game simply doesn't keep track of time spent on comm lots and what day it is where (that said, maybe this could be fixed along the lines of the Community Time Project and the Sync Timer somehow rolled into one? My current workaround is that I play all businesses Mon-Fri roughly 09:00-17:00, so that the employees' actual working hours are at least roughly equivalent to the time they spend offworld .. but of course it would be much less tedious if they'd leave and return automatically at the proper times on the proper day. If the employee lot is ahead of time of the business lot, the work hours would have to revert to the default 09:00-17:00 .. or maybe it would even be possible to set a default per business? Like for nightclubs and such? But, anyway, that's a different can of worms -- just thinking aloud).
Or do you mean with "hours at the business" vs. "actually working" that the employees get paid even if they hang around doing nothing useful? That's not too unrealistic from my experience .. :P
Anyhow, about the double payments: wouldn't it be possible to just nuke those "from the ether" payments for all business employees completely? Of course, then Alice would earn nothing as long as I don't play Bob's business, but seeing as my hoods are time-synced anyway, that would be exactly what I want. Bob would be in no danger to go broke -- he's only paying actively, not passively; if he runs out of money, he simply closes down shop and goes home. Or sends his employees home. Or lives with the fact that his familyfunds is now below zero. In any case, Alice wouldn't be earning money that doesn't exist ..
Khan of Wyrms:
Well, this issue does not really bother me at all. It makes at least as much sense as the business owner being able to spend a whole day at work and then go home so that they can go to a career job all day. What irritates me about the way the ownable business works is that the employees always have the '9 to 5, M to F' schedule. MEAxis should have make the business owner capable of setting a 'schedule' for the business, with specific work hours for each employee and days off. If a business owner hires a teenager to work the cash register, for instance, they should be able to set the work schedule for the employee to show up at 2, so that they can stay in school, especially since they gave no option for teenagers to 'drop out' of school. I am sick of having to make my playable teen employees quit their jobs so they can go to school, since eventually they must go to school, due to they way the game is handled.
So, in my opinion, the most awesome adjustment that could be made to businesses would be the ability to set work schedules for each employee individually, and also set business hours for the commercial lot. After all, there are not many real businesses that do not have either schedules for their employees or standard hours of operation. I do not understand why they did not include this in the game.
As for the 'double-dipping', do the employees also get paid when visiting the lot with a third party, so that they are actually 'triple-dipping' or even more, depending upon how many times the business is visited by playable customers? I never really bothered to check this out.
pbox:
Quote from: Khan of Wyrms
It makes at least as much sense as the business owner being able to spend a whole day at work and then go home so that they can go to a career job all day.
Oh but that you can fix with the Community Time hack .. have you ever tried it? Most awesome.
Quote from: Khan of Wyrms
If a business owner hires a teenager to work the cash register, for instance, they should be able to set the work schedule for the employee to show up at 2, so that they can stay in school
There is a fix for that too, not sure what it's called but I think it's a MATY hack. Not exactly what you want (totally customisable work hours) but at least it moves the teen work schedule to something school-compatible, 15:00-20:00 or somesuch .. but I agree with you, custom schedules would be the better solution =)
ETA:
Quote from: Khan of Wyrms
do the employees also get paid when visiting the lot with a third party, so that they are actually 'triple-dipping' or even more, depending upon how many times the business is visited by playable customers?
Ugh, now that you say it .. I think this is so. I know for sure that it works that way for business owners -- say they have 500§ in cash upon last lot exit, you visit their business a couple of times, enter the owner's home lot again and their budget will be 800§ or whatever. Logically I think this would have to be the same for the employees. But this is at least money that exists within the game (in that it has a source and a target), and it totally makes sense for when your visiting sims themselves buy something or give the waiter a tip. Any additional owner->employee payments can always be explained away somehow (bonus payment for good performance or somesuch), only the payments from nowhere cannot.
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