Sims Social: Careers
The big news in the Sims-o-sphere this week is the release of Careers to the Sims Social Facebook game. This is the game's first real gameplay update since it was originally launched last August. Exciting stuff!
There are currently three careers (with the possibility of more to come): Cooking, Singing, and Painting. Your Sim can change careers at any time, although there is a penalty, and you have to start off lower on your new career ladder.
Careers offer you the ability to earn Simoleons with a method that is, I'll use the term "gardening-like." You click a thing, and then you have to come back N hours later to click another thing. In gardening you're planting seeds and returning to harvest them. With careers you're setting appointments, then returning to make those appointments. It's a little weird, but it makes more sense if you think of it like a very strange form of gardening.
Each career has an assortment of activities you can do, and amounts of money you can earn. As a general rule, the longer you have to wait, the more Simoleons you earn for the task. You might earn 5 Simoleons for waiting 10 minutes, or 100 Simoleons for waiting 12 hours.
This is a wholly artificial system. But if you think about it, so is gardening. The underlying mechanics are essentially the same.
When you return, click the briefcase icon. In an in-game pop-up window you will see a little animation of your Sim performing whatever task it was, and then you get credited the Simoleons. Advancing up the career ladder is a matter of performing enough of the right sorts of tasks, and can eventually unlock some pretty sweet career objects.
There is one difference between careers and gardening which is as significant as it is diabolical: the "Hurry Up" button. If you don't want to wait 10 minutes, you can click Hurry Up, pay some SimCash, and have it take fewer minutes. This is probably the most direct way yet for you to convert your actual real-world money into Simoleons for your Sims.
You don't - and I can't emphasize this enough - want to do this. There is no career reward that is worth paying actual money to make it happen faster. You still have to wait, and click, and do the thing, it just doesn't take as long. Please, save your money! Use it for situations where you have no other way to get what you want, whether it's a rare Crafting ingredient or a Store item that you've just gotta have.