Preowned Housing Refurnishment - A Nuisance?

Preowned Housing Refurnishment - A Nuisance?

Does anyone else think it's SUPREMELY annoying how when a family moves entirely out of a house, by any means, including the classic TS1 Proposal Moves Keep Furniture trick, every single piece of furniture in the now abandoned house is summarily destroyed, requiring that the house be refurnished at best, and rendering it more or less useless at worst?

It gets worse. Maxis seems to have gotten very sadistic about this. In TS1, you could STILL save a house with its furniture by locking or backing up the old house file. In TS2, this doesn't quite work: Even if you restore a backup of the house file, which should, in theory, contain all of the furniture, for some reason, TS2 still manages to notice this and strip the house of all furniture. Evil, isn't it?

Isn't this entire refurnishing mess annoying as hell?

 

Problem solved--sort of.

When I created my neighborhood I created a minimum prefurbish with each home (beds, counters, appliances, low-cost TV, etc) and then packaged the lot. Now, when someone moves out, I bulldoze the lot and reload it from the packaged file.

 

Oh, I definitely agree on its annoyingness. WHY must it all be sold? TS2 can obviously handle furnished, empty lots perfectly, so can't Maxis at least include an option to delete/not delete? And if you wanted to delete some and hold onto the rest, it should be a simple matter to hit F2 and selectively delete, and tell it to keep all. What the hell makes this so difficult?

And Rowanstaff's method won't work for houses played on for long periods of time, because they will more than likely have changed fundamentally in design and architecture due to the steady increase of finances to burn. Needless to say, it's still a very incomplete solution to the problem.

BTW, I'm wondering: when moving out, is stuff sold at a higher price than individually selling/deconstructing in F2/F3, or is it the same. Just curious.

 

It's not difficult, it's intentionally perverse! Not only does it technically not happen until you actually look at it, but Maxis has gone out of their way to intentionally thwart you. In TS1, if a family was vacated from the lot by means of being invited to move out from another lot, the house was left intact. Similarly, if you locked the file, the house was left intact. If you restored the file, you could actually reload a perfectly good used house. It wasn't really a huge problem, in TS1....and nothing should have changed in TS2....except that Maxis has now INTENTIONALLY put in EXTRA code to make sure the house loses its furniture, every time.

Yes, that's not really a solution at all.

Nope. It's sold off at the same massive loss that you bought it at. Of course, while in real life, your loss is somebody's gain, in TS2, your loss is nobody's gain....

But there's a solution.

In my natural, probing fashion, I was determined to defeat Maxis on this matter. Here is what I found: When a family is moved out, the game does not, technically, make the alterations that actually destroy all of your furniture. It's a little more sinister than that. Let's say we try the classical TS1 solution: We simply quit the game, and overwrite the lot file with the old version, which we backed up. Guess what? That doesn't quite work. The furniture is still stripped from the house. I'd go so far as to hazard a guess that if you overwrote it with an entirely different and unrelated lot, one that wasn't lived in at all, the furniture would STILL be stripped out!

The reason for this is very insidious. Maxis, apparently, upon detecting the move-out of a family, flags the lot in question for furniture strippage, to occur the next time you attempt to enter the lot.

But you can defeat this. After moving out, enter the lot, observing your ruined house. *NOW* quit the game, and restore the backup.

Voila, the furniture remains. The family to move in gets the benefit of a shiny, furnished lot. The furniture is slightly used, but hey, when you're on a budget of $20K, why should you be snooty and refuse to accept some discount used furniture? As it turns out, a peasant hovel formerly worth about $19K, sells on the used-and-abused market for a mere $9K. That, my friends, is a bargain. And hey, at least your sim's loss is now a new sim's gain. Plus you don't have to refurnish the **** thing, and a used house is no longer entirely useless, since previously, there would be nobody capable of affording the **** thing, so they'd go off and purchase another El Cheapo Thatched Roof Peasant Cottage, and leave your very nice midrange home sitting there uselessly, since they couldn't possibly afford to simultaneously purchase and furnish it, and the midrange home market is, frankly, very lacking: Why bother moving into one, if you're just going to lose all of your career awards, all of your furniture, and a fat chunk of your cash again, merely impeding your move into your future mansion? Nah, let's just tough it out. This hovel's gotten pretty nice anyway, we can wait.

But now, you can sell off those used hovels, with the career awards intact, to somebody who can still make use of them.

Naturally, this is a somewhat more complex solution that requires a certain amount of computing acumen to pull off, but it's certainly faster than having to refurnish everything!

 

Your point is pointless JMP.

There is no evidence, that I have seen, for TS2 objects loosing their charm as they age; value they lose, yes. Room factor, needs factors and so on do not diminish with age. What you seem to want is 50 grand's worth of bling-bling on 20 grand's worth of capital. There is an easier way: ctrl+shift+c ... Motherlode and Robert becomes your mother's sister's spouse ...

It is groundless and misleading to suggest that Maxis has deliberately 'fixed' the game to swindle innocent sims out of their hard-earned buckeroos. It is more likely that plans for keeping Sims and their possessions together were laid aside because of the potential for game conflicts and errors.

 

I think the reasoning for selling off furnishings is so that the family will have plenty of money for redecorating the new home. Anyone who has moved several times IRL knows that when you purchase a new house, you usually do a re-model, new paint, new floors, new furniture, something. If you don't do it right away because you're usually broke from paying closing costs and bank fees (Now, there's an insidious plot for you to tackle, JMP ) you feel "icky" living in another person's decor.


Now, I haven't tried it, so I don't know, but do you loose the bathroom fixtures and kitchen appliances if you "pre-furnish" the house before the family buys it?

 

Nonsense. What I *WANT*, is not to have to constantly restock the same house, because it's annoying to be constantly *REDOING* the same exact thing. The fact that you sell the house intact, without torching the place, is simply a very nice bonus.

I would believe that if it weren't so outright sadistic. No moving van with things packed up little boxes? Sure, I'll buy that this wasn't done out of sheer laziness. The concerted effort to destroy every single object in the house, as an act of laziness, though? I don't buy that. You seem to be intent on being an apologist for everything Maxis may or may have done. Do you work there? Because otherwise, I don't see why YOU having given THEM money suddenly elevates them in trustworthiness.

 

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No I am not a Maxis employee, No I am not an apologist for the Maxoids. Whichever way you want to look at it, games like TS2 are much more like an illegitimate hybrid of a paint program, a database application and a spreadsheet than anything else. The output from interaction between those elements is then fed into a 3D rendering gizmo and we're back to our meeting with uncle Bob. In any system where the balance of each component depends intrinsically upon the stability of its hierachical surroundings your accusation that there is a "concerted effort to destroy every single object in the house" is the act of a lazy mind. Wiping a spreadsheet column (or db table) and replacing the values with zeroes or null strings would cause far fewer conflicts ... as well as preventing lazy cheats from bequeathing trailer-trash sims with top quality furnishings at knock-down prices.

Like I said. Your point is pointless. It takes no time, in the scheme of things, to furnish a house. Your only complaint appears to be that cut-price furniture is not a feature of the game as it was released. If that isn't nitpicking, I do not know what is!

 

Well, you seem awfully inclined to complain every time I demonstrate that I have a less than obsequious attitude towards them. It's going to take a lot more than $-50(!) bucks to convince me to be their loyal bootlicker. For starters, they'd have to pay me, not the other way around. Until then, I will rightfully view their motives suspicion.

I don't buy that one. Keep in mind I've spent more time poking the guts of this than you have. Considering that it's entirely possible to wind up with an abandoned, furniture-intact house in-game, and even clone houses as such, I'm not buying that excuse. At best, it sounds like uninformed speculation, at worst, it's Maxian apologist propaganda. Naturally, to be on the safe side, I'm going to go with suspecting B. I didn't live this long by not expecting the worst from people. Maybe it's not true, but like the saying goes, it's better to be perpetually suspicious than occasionally cheated.

Actually, it takes an incredibly bothersome amount of time, and if there's anything I absolutely loathe, it's redoing work that was already done. I value permanence in problem-solving. It's a trait I made a career on. The fact that your family no longer has to lose half of its networth, and enrage every single ghost on the lot every time you're forced to use move-out/move-in? The fact that an old home can be handed down to your children without setting fire to every single piece of furniture in there? Hell, those are just pretty **** neat bonusses.

 

I accept that you are committed to your argument. I do not deny that my position appears to be as an apologist; I do not apologise for that. Is there no room for anyone other than sycophants in your following?

I too set store by permanence in problem solving. I also loathe -- with a passion -- dreary and repetitious tasks. I pride myself in being able to complete routine (not "mundane"!) tasks with speed and efficiency ... and I made a career out those attributes. So I do not understand, and cannot reconcile, how you can say that furnishing takes a "bothersome amount of time" and also (elsewhere) claim that you take hours to design a house. Now house-building (especially fine-tuning the design) is wrist-numbingly time consuming, but good designs can be saved, so avoiding the bulk of repetition. But furniture! Ye gods!

I still don't understand your peeve. If furnishings aged and lost character, charm and functionality with value then there would be merit in your argument.

 

Well, I've always felt that if you can't tackle a problem critically, you should at least wipe that drool off your chin. If you can't find something bad about it, you're not trying hard enough, and if you're not trying, then your opinion doesn't seem to be worth very much. I mean, who wants an uninformed, effortless opinion? How does this help the viewer make an informed decision? No, in order for an opinion to truly matter, you have to find a point, some flaw, and then proceed to beat it into the dirt. That's why I tend to find game reviews useless: They're so full of sold-out drooling, that you really learn nothing about the game. Some of them can be quite amusing, but as an informational tool, they are worthless. Show me something that blasts the game for its flaws. These are points that can be evaluated. To merely say that it is good? That tells me nothing. Good news, is no news.

I'm not quite the sort of person who could quite make a career out of routine tasks, mostly because my kinds of solutions tend to eliminate the need for the routine task in question. Of course, there are people willing to pay large sums of money for my kinds of solutions, so it evens out.

But the furniture is an essential part of the house design! Without the furniture, the house itself is built in minutes, since it's basically a box carved out on the lot with a few ornamental protrusions. However, fine-tuning the furniture placement is an act that requires much testing in every new house, since I try to get away from cloning too many houses, as it tends to make the gameplay start to feel repetitive. Plus, I like to explore to see if I can find a better mousetrap, a new trick, anything. If anything, the placement of the furniture is a fine art: It must be efficient, orderly, and yet the tall pieces of furniture musn't block the camera and prevent access to other pieces of furniture. Needless to say, it's extremely infuriating to have all of the work senselessly destroyed like that, for no particularly good reason.

What also bothers me is the inherent sense of waste. I've never been one to waste anything, and my own home is full of stuff that I no longer use, but simply couldn't get a fair price for, so I keep it. There are few things I find more galling than the sense of being ripped off. This is, in part, why I have ranted extensively on what is, in truth, a highly secondary issue as far as TS2 itself is concerned. The fact that the solution I've found kills two birds in one stone...well, that just makes me very, very happy. Well, okay, technically, it's more like "very less annoyed", in literal me-speak, seeing as my view of a positive thing is defined by the absence of the negative, but I'm giving you the benefit of the translation here.