Ha, I'm not actually dead It seemed like it for awhile there. Ha! She's alive! And she got OFB for her birthday. I, the free-roaming free-lancing employee-with-an-attitude, now running a business. (Not well, I might add.) I just love giving people makeovers, eegads. My adult funhouse is slowly building a base as well. Question: Can the boss sleep at work? And can you do anything about people who come and *complain* at you (old karma, what can I say) and then make the other customers mad, too?
No to both, I'm afraid. Actually, I'm not sure about the soothing complaints. I'm hoping that once I've got more biz perks built up I'll be able to use one of them to stop all the complaining. I've had complaints at weddings! Argh! The home business wasn't even open at the time. As for sleeping on the job, the best you can do is energize, or caffeinate, as far as I can tell. Welcome back! You were missed.
Complaining OFB Customers Yah, it's one of things I always loathe about computer gaming: the "non-player controllable scenario that seems to serve no purpose except to make the player's activities more difficult. This is what I define as cheating (by the game programmers). It's a means by which the game designer adds difficulty to the game structure without adding (player enjoyment) value ... or value for money IMHO. It's exactly the same thing as the old-fashioned thriller serial where the hero was clearly seen, bound hand and foot inside a car that headed, for sure, over a perilous cliff in the final scene of one episode and is then seen, miraculously untied, and rolling clear of the impending wreck several yards nearer to safety (and further from doom) than the evidence of both memory -- and the preceding week's episode's damning footage -- would otherwise confirm. It's a cheat. In literature it is called a deus ex machina. In video gaming it is cheating by making it appear that the computer is cheating the player, whereas it is the game designer who is cheating the paying the customer by giving short change.
Some of the business perks seem to address this - knowing customers' moods (so you can avoid them) and improving their moods with a smile and stuff. I loathe the idea of actually owning a business - I free-lance but am boss, employee, CEO and janitor and wouldn't do it any other way - but I find this an interesting challenge. I started a game club - poker, bowling, hot tub, sandwiches - but it was only when I started selling teddy bears (just out of curiosity) that I got popular. Weird.
My most successful business to date is run by a sim that I don't even write about. He used to live with Solange and is now married to pajama girl, who I made a PC so she could change back from being a vampire. (Didn't suit her.) They have a son and live in the ranch house, which I've expanded quite a bit. The business is in the living room. This is so much easier than having a business at a separate lot. For one thing, they can work the store in shifts if one of them needs to sleep, and care for their son at the same time. Mostly he works the customers, and the register, she restocks and cares for the kid. She's a lazy slob and isn't very good at PR. Seriously. She has 0 points of neat, 0 points of active. The business perks I've picked so far have been three levels of wholesale, one of influence and one of networking. The business is well on its way to level 6 and little Tim is a happy toddler, so things are good all around. Anyway, that's the way I'd recommend doing it, at first. Community lot businesses are a much bigger challenge, especially since you can't sleep on the job. Though you can use an energizer, if you're in a good enough mood. I do have some community businesses that are doing OK, but they seem kind of disjointed in that when you get home, it's the same time you left. And it's hard to refuel.
Yes that is a strange anomoly isn't it. I've had an own stay 3-4 days at a time at the community business he owns and had it still be monday when he finally goes home to socalize. go figure.
How did an owner stay 3-4 days? Mine get exhausted and there's a limit to how far caffeine and relaxing can take them. About 16 hours seems to be my limit until they beg to go to sleep. Which brings up another question. Can I send the owner home and keep the employee there with the business open? (Obviously *I* have to go home with the owner as the game will take me there.) The reason is that I always have customers and for the owner to leave, I have to chase them away. I haven't tried it yet in case I get ripped off. My employees (yes, they're well-paid) aren't the brightest bulbs in the package.
if you promote someone to manager... just be prepared for their decisions not to line up with yours... Oh, by the way, I confess to having that one painting that does just about everything...
Use the energizer. If the sim makes enough business-related goals while they're working they can usually maintain at least a gold mood. I played around and created a furniture store in the Hub, which I'm converting to a kind of mall. Keeping the disco and the restaurant, just adding stores as well. I know I can't actually have it be a furniture store unless someone buys the place, and I'm not ready to own such a large establishment. Headache city! Just wanted to see what I could put in it. Anyway, the point of all this is, I was able to put a bed on a community lot. Haven't tried to play the lot yet, so I don't know if anyone can actually sleep in it. But you might be able to try that with your sim who doesn't want to go home. And I hate sim employees. They are stupid!! The most I can handle right now is one. I tried four and every time I visited the lot as a customer they'd switched jobs. With one employee, and a small store, there's only so much they can do, and things run a little smoother.
Pescado has a number of OFB hacks. One to speed up the gaining of the bronze cash register badge on the basis that no-one should be that dumb, plus others to limit the stupidity of employees and the killer app: businessrunsyou hack
Oh, let me count the ways I hate that register thing. I mean, come on. Three or four of my sims now have gold sales badges, but among them there's only one who has a bronze register badge. The others are still getting hit in the stomach with the register drawer. To me, this makes no sense. You would think it would be the other way around. I'll have to look into those hacks. Thanks for the heads-up, Mirelly. BTW, there's this teenager in the game with a gold register badge. He's got the super-shaggy haircut, black hair, white skin. Just letting everyone who hasn't run into him know this. He's my one employee at Bev's House of Beauty. I don't know if he has the same name, or skills, in everyone's game, but there is at least one sim out there who can run the stupid register. He's worth every penny she pays him. Worth hunting for if you haven't found him already.
I was able to put a bed in my store - built a back room for the owner with an armchair, television and bed, and no windows, nice and dark. But all he can do there is 'relax.' When he gets in the red, it's not worth much. So I tried making a home floral business and immediately everyone in the neighborhood came over day and night and wandered through the house and yard. I had to build fences, put in locked gates and lock the house (never had this problem before). Now they all come in start *****ing and moaning about the locked doors and won't look at the flowers! Whassup?
I assume you didn't lock the room with the flowers in it, or any rooms leading to it. Make sure all doors (and gates) to rooms you want your customers to use are not locked. I also include a customer potty so they don't have accidents (though one did the other day, icky). I have a huge house with the two front rooms and one bathroom open to customers. The rest is locked. There's a stairway in the customer area but it leads to a hallway with a bunch of locked doors. So far none of my customers have wandered up there. OK, please forgive me if these questions are too elemental, but: Did you use the price tag thingy to set the flowers for sale? You have to do that on every item you want to sell. Do you have a cash register? If you've checked all this I'm not sure what else could be causing your problem. You may want to check your traffic flow patterns. Maybe people are just running into each other too much?
No, check on everything. I set it up outside, right inside the gate. There's a register, prices, and so on, but what I get are a few customers standing right in front of the register, flowers in reach, shouting and gesturing about the locked door to the house, and the locked gate to the yard. I wonder if it would be better to have a room so they couldn't see the very lovely grounds of my mansion - earned, I must tell you, without any hacks, through simple hard work in the worlds of business and crime. It's the son who is trying to sell flowers; he doesn't want to follow in dad's footsteps. I'll try building a dedicated room and see what happens.
That shouldn't matter. I've had businesses in the front yard, too, including two in buildings and one just on the lawn. Very strange. Congratulations on earning your mansion the hard way. Much more satisfying, in't it? Now with OFB I feel like my sims can leave their kids a whole dynasty. Just getting the money is kind of ho-hum, but a business empire, now, that's something different.
A great non-cheating way of having your community lot business open longer is to have a Servo run it. They can recharge during the daytime and they dont have as many needs. watch the aspiration meter though. Two downsides to this is, if they are not the owner of the business, then wholesale rewards do not count and you cant restock craftables. Servo's are created with the robotics station. A gold badge is needed.
