OfB Employee payments: How broken are they, exactly?
pbox:
Ste,
to me it seems like you want exactly what I want, but you might be making it too complicated:
In my unawesome mind (and this may or may not have anything to do with reality, because, like I said, I've no idea how the game actually handles things .. this is just guesswork from what I've seen in-game), there are two stacks of money involved:
Stack 1 is the amount that is actually paid to the employee by the owner or third-party sims (in tips, for example), either when you play the business directly or when you visit it with a third party. It goes directly to the employee's familyfunds and is available immediately when you play their lot next time. This is a realistic, *correct* figure: play Bob's business for 15 hours (either directly or by visiting it), then open Alice's home lot: she has earned 15 x her hourly wage, plus say 214§ in tips from other sims. If I'm not mistaken, the game already handles this automatically and correctly.
Stack 2 is the nominal fee that the employee would get if they would work for 8 hours -- a complete bullshit figure, in other words. This is what it says in the employee's job description; they receive it every Monday through Friday on their home lot when they return from work. This is money that the game pulls out of its ass (aka: the ether); it has no equivalent in-game. In other words, this does nothing but fuck up the so-far-so-good transaction that happened via Stack 1.
What you want to do now, I think, is somehow fumble Stack 1 into Stack 2, right? So that instead of Stack 1 going to the employee's familyfunds directly, it is stored somewhere in the ether and then gets paid out via Stack 2 (little by little, when they come home from work) .. right? With the exception of money that's earned during thirdparty visits because that sum you do want to put on Stack 1 and keep track of separately.
I think this would be very complicated all in all: say you have played Bob's business for two weeks and Bob has paid Alice 2.500§ in wages .. what should the game do if you open her lot, she goes to work, comes back and then .. what? Should she bring the entire 2.500§ on the first day? A percentage of it? What percentage? And then you would also have to keep track of who paid her what under which circumstances (playing the business vs. visiting the business), which to my unawesome mind sounds like a programming nightmare, the way I envision Maxian code :P
If my assumptions are correct, I think it would be easier to just nuke Stack 2 entirely: play Bob's for a week (directly or indirectly), he pays Alice a grand total of 1.250§, open Alice's home lot and she's 1.250§ richer. And that's it. She can "go to work" (i.e. offworld, from her home lot) as much as she wants to -- as long as we don't play or visit her workplace (i.e. as long as she doesn't actually *do* some work and gets paid by someone), there won't be any additional money falling from the sky. We'd still have to "play the business from both sides" this way, as you put it, only that Alice would have the entire sum available on day 1 and however long we play her it will not increase.
(For time-synced hoods, I agree it would be extra neat if the game would do a calculation such as: 2.500§ have accumulated on Alice's "account" (i.e. stack in the ether) while the user played Bob's business for 67 hours (directly or indirectly), so for now we're gonna pay her (2.500 / 67 = 37,313432835821) x 8 = 298,50746268657 every day (and adjust this figure whenever the user play Bob's business again (and if we run out of money she'll earn zero for the rest of the time)) .. but that would only work for people who keep their hoods in sync, and also there would be no way for the user to know how much there currently is in Alice's "account" -- how much she's earned so far --, which is not unimportant in order to decide whether she should buy that new car or not, etc .. and, like said, it sounds a bit complicated to me all in all, on the other hand maybe my view is too simplistic)
So, yeah. I'm really curious whether I'm interpreting this whole thing somewhat correctly, and what people who actually *could* implement a fix are thinking of it ..
*pokes the awesomefolk*
pixiejuice:
Quote from: pbox on 2007 August 21, 20:32:24
In my eyes, this actually makes total sense -- if Celia spends money at Bob's business, that money should better end up somewhere. Also: everything else that happens to Alice and Bob during Celia's visit (say Alice meets Joe and Bob pees himself) will leave memories and affect relationships etc, it's clearly part of their lives, so why not the financial side of it?
It [triple-dipping] does make sense, in theory. But here is my problem with it, an example from my game:
David owns a level 10 banquet hall, and charges customers $50 an hour. He has two employees, Andrea (DJ) and Mallory (manager). David has to have a manager if he wants to make money at home, and Mallory demands that she be paid $110 an hour!!! Whatever, so David just doesn't ask her to come to work when he is there. Andrea is cheap and only wants $25 an hour, so David sells at the door himself, and Andrea DJ's, and David makes lots of money. And David still gets to make money at home because he has a manager, even if he never uses her.
BUT, lets say Toby is a visiting sim at David's banquet hall, and he spends a long time there. (This is where the triple-dipping takes place) Both Andrea and Mallory show up to work and David's profits are sucked dry! He makes no net profit while Toby is visiting, even though Toby has paid him $50 x however many hours he stayed.
So that is my gripe with it. Even though in theory it makes sense.
But *light turns on above my head* I could probably just mind-control David and have him send Mallory home. And if I played David and had him manage his business while Toby is visiting, he could maximize his profits and make the visit worthwhile. Off to try it...
pbox:
Quote from: darcee
BUT, lets say Toby is a visiting sim at David's banquet hall, and he spends a long time there. (This is where the triple-dipping takes place) Both Andrea and Mallory show up to work and David's profits are sucked dry! He makes no net profit while Toby is visiting, even though Toby has paid him $50 x however many hours he stayed.
So that is my gripe with it. Even though in theory it makes sense.
But *light turns on above my head* I could probably just mind-control David and have him send Mallory home. (..)
Or you could try to get hold of that noquit hack (the Squinge one) and set Mallory's wage to something that makes sense for this business? Like said, I've no actual experience with managers, but to me that would seem like the easier solution.
Singularity:
I spent some time digging through the code for hiring employees. I'm rather unaccustomed to SimPE, and therefore not very awesome, but I did manage to hack together something preliminary. The stock "Employee" career is stored just like any other. The best I could do with the meager skills I have is set the career for both teen and adult/elder so that you work 0 days of the week. ::) That eliminates double-dipping, but unfortunately doesn't let your sim get a second job. I don't know how I'd go about doing that. The game relies on that career being there to properly transfer employees from one business to another, among other things, and having one sim employed to several businesses sounds like a VBT. :-X
Soylent Sim:
I actually got the idea that what Ste wanted was much simpler. When the employee is working on someone else's lot, the owner loses money but the employee gains none. The employer pays for work done, but the employee isn't doing any "real" work (from the perspective of their lot and the motives/lifespan they're losing) so doesn't get money from it. When the employee goes off to work from their own lot, they're paid from the aether; nothing of value is happening at the employer's business, and all "costs" are to the employee's lifespan and motives, so that's where the money goes. It should all work out to something roughly even if you play roughly time-synched throughout the 'hood. Visiting as a third-party sim would probably work best if neither employer, employee, nor the business ranking had any adjustment; not only do neither do any real work or suffer any real losses, but lack of payment and business adjustment would prevent maxian stupidity from ruining a business' rank or the owner's bottom line, while the actual shoppers got their standard goods-for-cash swap.
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