Well, it's really more of an effective gameplay thing than a realism thing. I expect that they figure an elder is going to move in with their kids, or vice versa, to help take care of the grandchildren. (Only good thing about elders. Just having them at home meditating or puttering around the house keeps the social worker from coming, and with the "No Get Crappy Minimum Wage Job Wants" mod, they're happy to stay home with the kids and nix the need for a nanny.) And the inheritance thing is an incentive to keep the elders in Platinum, at least around 6 o'clock.

Making insurance realistic would make it too easy to abuse. You make a family of eight, with whatever sims you want to play and a handful of filler sims, then kill off the filler for the cash. On the other hand, it would make more sense to just move them in and out of the house repeatedly if you didn't have the no20khandout hack, but whatever.

Having inheritance be logical would make some players happier, but it would also provide an incentive for elders to live by themself, particularly if they had multiple kids, because otherwise the kid they live with would either get all the money or the money from the household fund would get moved without the player's consent to other houses. As it stands, it only annoys players who want their sims to work for every dime they have, and we have JMP's money order hack for that. Just move a townie in, get 'em a lot, and use them as a cash dump.

Yup, that's supposed to happen. And bunnies of the same color will fight. Actually rather funny to watch.

Does he have a handhelp game? That can cause MPD in sims.

Ah. That makes significantly more sense.

The social bunny I can sort of see needing multiples of, up to a maximum of eight. But Social worker? You can't even interact with her, and they all look basically identical anyway! Variety is good, but only if it's not pointless.

That, and JM has a tank. It's hard to make someone disappear if they have a tank.

Hang on a tick. The problem (or a problem) is that when a neighborhood gets enough character files in it, it starts making useless, weird character files? Which would cause there to be more sims in the neighborhood than there are any actual records of?

The problem is caused by the fact that the game never deletes character files by itself. Every sim that has ever been in the neighborhood will continue to be in the character files until you delete them.

I think maids are less of a problem than headmasters because their behavior is fairly simple and doesn't involve a whole lot of new pie menus and whatnot, and because there's an ingame moment that turns it off. (Now that I'm done with work, do you want to hang out?) That would make it easier to debug.

I actually kind of like the idea of having a streaker in my regular neighborhood . . . may have to play with that.

Meh. Our form of democracy doesn't really do what it's supposed to. Country is generally too large of a level of social organization to do anything really useful except get on people's nerves. Decentralization actually works surprisingly well. Just ask ants. They've taken over the world without anything resembling a leader. Even the queen is much more like the germ cells of a single organism than any sort of administrator.

It might be nice to have an option to neuralyze them . . . but I guess that's what Carrigon's memories in a bottle is for. If they have too many memories of dead sims, just zap 'em with that. Not perfect, but a serviceable solution.

I actually have a hard time blaming Maxis for this craptastic bugfest. It looks to me like this is a classic case of Management Deadlines vs. Devolepment Team = Squish. Seen it happen to KOTOR II. That thing didn't even have an actual ending, just a weird wrap up where various minor characters suddenly appeared, disappeared, and generally did things to wreck suspension of disbelief. It happened to Jak 3. The original screw up that was Jak II (A good game, but it could have been way cooler.) was nothing compared to the massive display of rushed-ness that was Jak 3. They gameplay was beautiful, but the plot and the cut scenes sucked.

Mind you, this is because I like Maxis. I've been a fan of theirs since Sim City 2000 was new. I've played all the Sim City games, Sim Life, and Sim Earth. I enjoyed all of them. Now, granted, Sim Life and Earth had serious bug and documentation issues, but this was before they were acquired by EA and had so little money that the company controller would come by Will Wright's office and say "You don't really need that computer, do you?" Now, instead of EA providing them with resources and allowing them to do their thing, it has to get involved with everything, totally screwing everything up. The only developer at Maxis who doesn't get hammered by management idiocy is Will Wright, because he's made two huge blockbuster franchises, and it shows. As soon as he leaves a franchise, it starts sucking. (Note the downward spiral in bugishness in Sims1 expansion packs.)

Okay, that's enough rant for today.

From now on, that will be my official tech support response. I will also look into making it into a t-shirt. It would be a good item on thinkgeek.com. Go well with "No, I will not fix your computer."

It's a reference to "The Insidious Doctor Vu," a character named after one of the core sim team members. He also shows up involved in various nefarious plots in Sim City 4. I'm not sure if that's the guy's actual name, or a net handle, but he's the one who told everyone that he'd lobbied hard for polygamy in TS2, based on his own personal experience. "Vu's personal experience" was for a while a pretty much catch-all excuse for why something random and weird was in The Sims. Rather like Boris, from what I've heard about him.

Honestly I think he's probably against that too.

Perhaps he was trying to drum up support for looser gun control. Handgun vs. machine gun.

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."

That goes in my signature. It's just priceless. Even tops the magnet I have. "I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success, as opposed to failure."

Yes, but Kennedy was assassinated, and Clinton was character assassinated. Generally, the ones who get attacked are the ones who actually have some idea what they're doing. Britain might have the same problem; I don't know quite enough about the history of the UK to be sure.

TS1 wasn't so much better written than TS2 as it didn't have all kinds of weird crap tacked on to it that the system was never designed to support. Teddy bears and RC cars, for example. The core TS1 stuff still works pretty well, but anything that depends on the memory system is often rather screwy.

I really need to get around to building Mausoleums for my sims . . . I've got a couple of elder ghosts who are upset because I sold their crappy bed and/or their crappy toilet so I could by a nice new shiny one that actually worked. That, and I suspect I'll need one to experience the true awesomeness of the Ghostbuster.

Well, sure. If you actually made your sims learn how to cook, and gave them pool ladders. But where's the fun in that?

These people mean in illegal ways. You know, secret operatives changing the outcome of the computer systems, buying off (or otherwise pressuring) Supreme Court justices. That sort of thing. I honestly think these people are rather silly. Bush won, whatever, if he did anything untoward I don't have any particular interest in it, because politics in this country just gets on my nerves. They need to learn how to conduct their arguments properly, from the scientific community. There they will learn about the proper implementation of both humour and bile.

Oh, and I envy you UK people for having a leader who actual speaks English. Americans don't appreciate the fine art of oratory.

If bunker /= buried, then I don't know what does. And obviously, SJActress means that we should bury *boring* people. You know, the ones who actually don't do anything after they retire.

I have several relatives and other acquaintances who are convinced that Bush manipulated both elections. I tend to attract paranoid conspiracy theorists, for some reason.

Oh, and age discrimination cuts both ways. Be under 18 in this country, and you are screwed. Not allowed to vote, a variety of jobs you can't work in, you must sit in a large, prisonlike building under the pretense of education all day, not allowed to make any legal decisions for yourself, etc. And speaking of sex, a large portion of the country thinks that you know nothing about it, and should be kept this way. These people are now regularly featured on the new and improved Daily Idiot, or will be in the near future.

Ah hah! That's your evil plot! I knew there had to be one somewhere around here. JMPescado is in league with Maxis! They make bugridden games so that he can fix them and thus further his obvious plot to take over the world, thus guaranteeing them (theoretically) a cut of the action. Yes . . . it all makes sense now . . .

If that actually happens, it's actually rather likely that it'll be my fault.

I expect that the JMPescado sim had to have his gravestone removed because he wouldn't stop bothering the living sims, and picked somewhere really inconvenient to die? I honestly don't understand sim behavior in this area. I can just see it: "He died in the bathroom, so by the Great Malevolent User we're going to bury him in the bathroom! And I don't care if that means he's blocking the toilet; we can just dig him up to move him somewhere else, thereby incuring his everlasting wrath upon us all and most likely resulting in our untimely demise."

Actually, the grave/mourning behavior is not nearly as much of an issue as it was in TS1. The advertisements on graves were insane. Now the big problem (as JMPescado has ranted about) is baby bothering. Nothing attracts an almost dead from hunger sim faster than a crying baby. Many other things are now managed by the memory system, as far as I can tell. Which has it's own set of problems, since bad data has a habit of spreading virally and causing massive game implosion.

It'll probably be up in a few days. I don't have much else to do, and all I need to do is make some non-craptastic sims for the first version. Probably just going to be a variety of "Basic" PTs, as in, would fit in PT Smith's family tree. I have a bunch of bink13y's stuff, too, but I'll need to make some modifications to the genetics before I do a freakish sims version, since several of the weirder sims only have hair for females.

Mind you, I honestly haven't a clue what I'm doing. I know nothing about uploading protocol. If fwiffo flames me I'll probably have to take it down, but I *think* he's okay with it, since he's the one who told me how to do it in the first place.

Come to think of it, it would be rather amusing to do an entire "JMPescado pack" with sim-JMP and his various sim-offspring. Hmm. The possibilities with this thing are endless.