Beware of mood/energy improvements bug?

Hello,

maybe some of you have already noticed, maybe some of you are unaware - there is a bug concerning temporary mood/energy improvements that causes your energy & mood consumption to steadily go down, especially if you use or exchange these improvements on a regular basis.

This is what happens: (Please note, this is not an instruction for cheating; using a bug on purpose can get your account suspended or banned)

Let's say you have a house that consumes 100 mood and you put a 3* massage chair in. The chair gives you a 15% mood loss bonus, so in the house layer the consumption shows 85 (85% of 100) and 15 points are subtracted from your total mood loss on your mood bar in the upper right corner.

Now, when the massage chair expires, the figure in the house layer goes back to 100. So far, so good. However, on your mood bar, the 15 points are not added again to the total mood loss as it should be. Instead, they are subtracted again, most likely without you even noticing!

Deleting the improvement after its expiration doesn't change or correct anything.

It gets worse if you directly replace an expired improvement. In the previous example, the massage chair gave you 15 mood points when you installed it, and another 15 when it expired. Now, if you decide to replace it with another replacement (directly replacing it without deleting the chair first), it will subtract those 15 mood points for a a third time!

None of this will show in the house layer itself, you can only see it by observing your mood/energy figures before and after every action. It's however especially tricky to observe the bug when a mood/energy improvement expires, because it's rather unlikely that you happen to write down your overall figures the moment before and after its expiration.

The same happens if you replace an improvement before its expiration. It will give you the bonus again the moment you replace it with something else. This is easier to observe, so I made some screen shots. The studio apartment`s original mood consumption was 126 before installing the improvement, so the stereo gave a bonus of 32 points when it was installed. The moment I replaced it with the whirlpool, another 31 points are subtracted from the overall mood loss, instead of 32 points added as it should be. (25% of the original 126 is actually 31.5, so it's rounded up in one case and rounded down in the other, but that's just another minor thingy). Anyway, the screen shots:


Same effect if you replace an improvement with the very same improvement. In this example, I put a stereo into a house and got 14 points subtracted from the overall mood loss. I then replaced it with the same stereo. Nothing should happen with the overall figures, as one bonus is simply exchanged with the same bonus. However, another 27 points are subtracted, which means that the bonus for the first stereo is given again and the bonus for the 2nd stereo is given on top of that:



Of course I haven't tested/observed this with all improvements on all houses, so I can't say for sure if it`s always like this. However, once I understood the general principle, I had the technical support review and reset my mood&energy levels and what happened was that my mood&energy bars dropped by several thousands of points because over the longrun the bug had given me all those "bug bonuses" which were then erased by the reset.

It might not be like this with all accounts either, but if you want to make sure that your mood&energy levels aren't merely an illusion, maybe you'd like to have your account checked as well. Because if BP decides to check/reset all accounts automatically eventually, you might be in for a rather unpleasent surprise.

 

This bug

sound like 'a dream come true' for every programmer - you know it's there but you cann't find it

 

No! Not another mood/energy bug. What is with this stuff? I haven't noticed this since I rarely use mood/energy improvements, but I've had plenty of trouble when choosing the mood/energy mastery.

 

Thanks for the warning. The poor mods/help desk will be probably overwhelmed now with requests to re-set the mood and energy bars... I think I will lay off all non-epic mood and energy enhancers for the time being.

 

Just had game reset, for an unrelated problem, Ouch, suddenly down to 75% Mood and energy. Spent the week end building power plants and mood enhancers. Now have a cemetery of Zeus statues and Rock Hands (they were free). Halloween is coming up. Can anyone spare some MM's

 

thx for info. Forum closed. (only kidding) !