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Seems to work fine with money objects and I would also think it would be easy to incorporate as the code is already there. Must be timed or must be based on completion. Either way I'm sure it wouldn't take much to make it work. And like the title says, Just an idea..........
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That works because the kickback is only given for sold items, so there's no way a person can walk away, start an object, get a simolean, walk away for 2 seconds and go back on it to get another one. One simolean by itself isn't much, but there are people that want something for nothing enough to sit there and start and stop start and stop start and stop just to keep racking up simoleans and yes, that'd be an exploit. Here's some math:
Say someone with a high speed connection could start and stop every 2 seconds, so they get 1 simolean every 2 seconds. For most players, they're not gonna sit there and do that for long, because boredom would set in.....but for others who basically have nothing better to do and are loners anyway so they don't get bored by themselves it *could* work out like this
60 seconds = 1 minute, divided by 2, equals 30 simoleans per minute.
60 minutes to 1 hour then equals
$1800 simoleans per hour still small potatoes by production city standards, but not the new economy.
Then take into account that some players play up to 8-12 hours a day, even without 3rd party programs, and you're looking at the possibility of anywhere from 9600 to
21,600 per day. That STILL would be small potatoes by production city standards, even pre-huge exploit, but by new economy standards that'd be huge, especially considering nothing said they MUST use that money to host but could conceivably just buy a bookcase, plunk it on their lot and do that themselves just for profit....kinda reminds me of the pinata and tip jar bugs. Simple safeguards could prevent this, but EA would have to implement those safeguards, and they often don't do that until something has already been exploited, as a fixing measure rather than preventative (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure has meant nothing in the past, more like an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure
).
Something else that comes to mind would be if the kickback was based on RL clock hours, or converting RL clock hours to sim time, or perhaps you only got the kickback a certain number of times per day per unique visitor (in otherwords one time, or 3 times or whatever no matter how long Sally Sim visited your lot in a maintenance to maintenance period). That would probably be alot more code-intensive though, if it's even possible, which I'm not sure it is.
Ultimately though, I still believe it comes down to the basic belief that players need to come to grips with, that skill houses are not meant to be like universities where sims pay a tuition which makes you turn a profit, and they are meant to provide a service, much like any not-for-profit organization. I really think any sim wishing to make their money doing something other than owning a store or spending time at or running a money house needs to get into rare selling, or something like that, and not rely on their skill house to MAKE them money, and at this stage of the game not even count on breaking even with it. If we were back in beta where we could still form habits of being charged for things and such, then maybe it could work....but some of the people who sit back and pancake about always being broke now are the very same people who started giving away free food in order to gain the most visitors and therefore climb the almighty top 100 lists. The collective 'we' made our beds, now we just need to figure out how to live with the ramifications of the choices that the collective 'we' made. Hindsight is always 20/20. People always say "If I just knew then what I know now".....but I remember people post-release predicting this very thing would happen, and stating so, only to be told, I don't care if I'm broke, I just want to climb the list, money is easy to make in the game......OK, so that was the attitude, now we have what we have.
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I sooooo did not read all that. I said it was JUST AN IDEA and I think it is a very do-able idea. Thats all folks.