Ailments, Balance, and Cooldowns: What's The Issue? (Patreon)

Yesterday I posted this fix for Ailments.

Let's go in-depth on what the problem is and why I believe it's not intentional.

Balance is a "Commodity". Commodities and Statistics are basically measurements of things- Motives count as them, too. They often go from -100 to 100 (Motives do this, which is why if you edit them with UI cheats you must enter a number in that range). They can cause things to happen at certain points, like giving you the "really has to pee" buff when bladder is particularly low.

Balance has a few effects as it lowers. One of these is that when it hits -35, it fires what is called a "loot". Loots are basically little bags of stuff that happens. The loot that happens at this point activates a function that has one purpose: It removes the buff your Sim might have that the game checks for when it tries to give them an Ailment. This is the Ailment Cooldown.

In a Commodity, a loot can be fired when entering a range as it decreases, or entering a range as it increases. For instance, you'll get the "really has to pee" buff when you enter a range while Bladder decreases. But obviously, as your Sim pees, their mood won't go in reverse, right? So you won't get that buff when it increases.

For Balance, and for that Cooldown Buff removing Loot, it's not on increase or decrease, it's on enter always. That means that it happens when Balance is decreasing past -35, or rising up past -35.

As a result, the following scenario is possible:

• Sim experiences Major Imbalance, and suffers an Ailment.

• Sim cures the Ailment. Curing an Ailment gives you the cooldown buff, which prevents further ailments for 1 day (which is way too low, but that's another issue).

• Because the Sim is still below -35 Balance, the next time they increase past that point, they will have the cooldown buff removed.

• This Sim who just got over an Ailment and then improved their Balance now is back at risk of getting Ailments, and can very easily get one again within the same 24 hour period as losing it.

When a Sim recovers from an Ailment, they also get a +20 boost to Balance. Imagine your Sim gets an Ailment, but you spend a couple days with it before curing it- why not, some of them have positive effects, right? By the time you cure it, let's say you're at -45 Balance.

See the problem?

You get +20 from curing the Ailment. The curing process gives you the cooldown. And because that +20 took you from -45 to -25...you passed over the -35 threshold, and the cooldown you just got is immediately removed.

In essence, the only way to ensure you actually get the cooldown is to get an ailment, raise your Balance up past -35, then cure the ailment, and receive the cooldown. It then will not be removed unless your balance lowers past -35 again.

If the devs made this loot activate on enter decreasing, this process wouldn't happen. You'd only lose the cooldown from Balance if it naturally lowered below -35.

HOWEVER, this does not solve the entire problem. Remember the loot I mentioned that we're discussing? Well, it isn't only activated from Balance at -35. It also happens every time the game tries to give your Sim an Ailment from contagion.

Above are all the situations that run this loot- so every time an incubated ailment from contagion tries to happen, it removes your cooldown. Every time pixies try to give you an ailment, it removes your cooldown.

When Sims are incubating an Ailment from Contagion, it does check for that Ailment cooldown...except, before it does that, the incubation process applies that same loot! Which means every time you are unknowingly carrying a contagion from contact with a Sim who had an Ailment, you lose the Cooldown.

There is a separate cooldown for contagion- whenever a contagion may spread, there's a chance you get the spread and start incubating, or you get a cooldown. That one only lasts 6 hours. But your Sim essentially fights the illness for 6 hours and after that period is at risk of getting it again.

• Hug Sim with Ailment

• Game sends you a loot: It has two possible results. Avoid contagion and get a cooldown, or begin to incubate an Ailment.

• If you avoid contagion, you get a touch contagion cooldown, and all physical interactions for the next 6 hours cannot cause contagion.

• If you did not avoid contagion, you'll get an Ailment at the end of the incubation process.

• The incubation process removes your overall ailment prevention cooldown, rendering it worthless, and allowing you to get an Ailment even if you just recovered from one in the past 24 hours.
  

My guess is that Ailments are meant to be a system where "every time your Sim becomes majorly imbalanced, they can get an ailment" so the -35 system is designed to ensure that even if you have the cooldown, you'll still get an Ailment. This makes sense because there are moodlets that explain you're not guaranteed one, but at risk of one, and they dont' make any sense if the cooldown is active while your Sim enters Major Imbalance. So they simply ensured that Major Imbalance always creates an Ailment.

Because of the way this tuning is organized, it looks to me like they had a design process where having a cooldown and having guaranteed ailment-causing scenarios were at odds with each other, and ended up somehow both making a cooldown that never works and making a way to remove the cooldown that they wanted there in the first place, and nobody noticed that none of this makes any sense in practice.

The issue is that because Balance can drop so suddenly, and because entering the -35 range causes the cooldown to remove whether going up or down, and because the sources of Ailments essentially ignore the cooldown anyway, you can very quickly end up in gameplay loops where a Sim gets an Ailment, passes it to another as a contagion you don't know is happening, gets cured, is supposed to have a cooldown period, the other Sim gets the Ailment they were incubating, the first Sim starts incubating their own Ailment despite having a cooldown (in theory), the incubation ignores the cooldown whether it already got screwed up or not, and so on and so on. Even a single sim living alone not getting any contagion can suffer from a negative feedback loop of low balance -> ailment -> cure -> continued low balance -> cooldown is lost -> ailment the same day.

My linked mod fixes these two problems (I hope. I have brute force tested it a lot, but haven't played, like, a week of game with it.) by removing the cooldown removal loot entirely. Whenever the game tries to remove the cooldown (EXCEPT WHEN THE COOLDOWN ENDS NATURALLY) it no longer can. It only removes naturally. This results in the previously mentioned problem where some moodlets don't mkae a lot of sense, or you can enter major imbalance and be fine without an Ailment because you're temporarily immune. This feels a lot better as a player, though, and restores the basic concept of a cooldown to logical functionality, in that it...continues to be a cooldown period.

I addressed this issue in the Q&A session on the Discord today with one of the game's designers. He did acknowledge it, but told me it needs to be posted on the forums. I have not posted it on the forums as I am currently temp-banned for telling someone their distaste for a feature they were struggling to play with is a skill issue lmfao. I'm asking another Modder to post it for me and will link the thread here.

But anyway yeah here's the ins-and-outs of the problem and how I think it needs to be altered for the systems to make any sense.