I am be beating a dead horse here as Google results show a lot of complaints and no answer.

But my concern is butlers are inconsistent in their behaviors. My very first butler is awesome. She is Camilla Fortescue. She did everything nicely. In fact I even took her almost for granted until I knew about the "butler problem".

Camilla Fortescue does: Cooking, Bed making, Laundry, Toilet cleaning, Shower herself regularly (duh), and sleep consistently (duh again). In fact, I had to restart Bridgeport the 2nd time, all households had to be re-placed from saved bins. Re-hiring Camilla Fortescue is also a charm (though I wonder how she retain my custom Career outfit that I CAS edit her with).

My 2nd and 3rd families had their butlers, but no matter what I tried, they will not do all the "duh" factors. Once again, I have mods that allow me to see their motives. Butlers never shower (see the stinky smoke from them), cook excessively, hardly ever touch laundry, hardly sleep.

In the very same neighborhood, here I have Camilla doing wonderfully, and the rest of the butlers just acting .... stupid. Why??? I did assign bed for butlers (and verified their names on it). I made the lot as accessible as possible, with no disturbances to prevent them to sleep or shower, or do laundry (I even put all possible showers/bathtubs I can get).

Before you blame any glitch, try this: Camilla is soooo wonderful, she even picks up every single piece of laundry right as it hits the ground. And I CAS edit them to ensure they all have the "Workaholic, Neat" traits.

Anyone has a clue on this?

Hell, I've had butlers just up and vanish, even though they are still employed. Yet another glitch we've all been waiting on EA to patch.

I hate butlers, they all look the same it's like they're a robot butler army :/

Had the same problem. Don't bother with them now, they're too much trouble!

I don't know if this is a bug in certain games or what, but my butlers have all been great. I always make friends with them, though, because if I don't, they end up leaving pretty quickly.

Thats weird, I have Camilla but shes terrible. Never showers, only sleeps a few hours at a time, she's ALWAYS cooking. When sinks break, she'll just mop the floor for hours and then not repair it. Very frustrating.

All Service NPCs are a total disaster atm. Maids, repairmen, babysitters, none will do anything unless you watch them for the whole time. And as I am currently paying a lot of attention to what happens in my games because I want to find out why I am currently suffering from such an increased rate of neighbourhood deterioration I also observed that they become worse the further you progress. A maid that might have been ok in the first weeks will gradually stop to function properly. The slightest distraction and she will end her shift, sometimes even in the middle of doing something. My current maid must have amassed a whole shipload of dirty dishes in her apron inventory by now because she hardly ever manages to reach the sink before she leaves taking the plates with her. And no, it's not my house. It's almost empty and consists of only one large room with an en suite bathroom.
I also noticed that she begins to do things she didn't do in the first weeks, like she takes food out of the fridge, sits down at the table but doesn't eat. Instead she stands up again, takes another plate from the fridge and then ends her shift, leaving me with two plates of rotten food by the end of the day when my Sims return. I also watched her drinking Plasma juice (where she got that from, I've no idea) and accordingly vomiting afterwards.
If anyone ever makes the "Perfect Maid and Service NPCs" mod, I will build them a temple and sacrifice whatever they desire for the sake of my sanity.

My Camilla will repair it too occasionally. But you forgot it is not the Butler's job to repair anything, right? They just do houseworks. You must call repairman for that.

There is always the cooking problem. Butler will cook 3 meals a day (or whenever sims' hunger falls below a certain %). And the fridge will pile up old food. Good thing is Camilla also takes care of that too autonomously. In fact, as long as Camilla is around, the only thing I really need to worry about is ... to pay the bill from mailbox weekly, and call repairman in case something breaks.

My other butlers are .... not so helpful, not even close. They don't even do half of what Camilla does. But most annoying of all is they do not shower, and their response to hygiene is constant tooth brushing.

My butler is so annoying, I think everytime I hire a butler, she has a 'car', or something, and she parks it on the street outside the house and EVERY time another car has to pass through the street it keeps honking because it can't pass through and it waits for an amount of time then the car disappears or something, it's so annoying even moveobjects won't fix it.

I've never had any butler problems. Ever.

Both butlers showed up all the time, always cleaned everything, always cooked whenever my Sims were getting hungry. With the babies they always took care of them, and when there was nothing else for them to do, they actually picked up the baby, carried it around and randomly snuggled or threw it in the air, raising it's social. Cute actually. Always worth the money.

Whenever something broke, the butlers would fix it. Clean out the food, bring in the newspaper (though sometimes they read it then threw it away, peeved me a bit). Never a problem. Never. They even paid my bills for me if I didn't sometimes.

Maybe it's cause I'm always good friends with the butler?

Last edited by SpookyOkyBatGirl : 23rd Apr 2011 at 9:01 AM.

Just making sure this thread doesn't get buried in case EA ever looks to see what isn't working!

It has been months since the butlers were released but they are terrible (as well as the other NPCs) and not worth the trouble. Mine cook constantly - a dozen meals a day - and they never clean. My fridge is so full of leftovers that I have the "More" option! Every flat surface in my VERY large house has dirty dishes on it. As for repairing, I don't expect them to fix a tub but they should be able to unclog a toilet and call for a technician. They should also be more diligent in attending the children. The butlers in S2 were proactive and seemed to function as they might be expected to in RL.

I wish EA would fix them or some wonderfully clever person would create a mod that would fix this as their negatives are outweighing the positives (built in babysitter, albeit a bad one!).

I don't like their interaction menus. You can ask service sims to hang out, but you can't tell them to get back to work; you're not paying them to socialize. And you can tell the butler to cook, but not to stop forcing the whole family to overeat and leaving cooked meals out to spoil. Or to clean or go to bed. Or do laundry. I thought they weren't capable of it because I locked a butler in his quarters with laundry machines and more laundry than fit in the hampers. (I gave him 3 full hampers.) He kept picking up the laundry on the floor and dropping it back down. Like, hey, maybe this time I pick it up, there'll be a new hamper!

My butler did well at first, but then he stayed up for two days and wouldn't go to sleep. He'll just randomly sit down and read. So, I forced him to go to bed. Later, he wouldn't get out of bed AT ALL. I did everything to get him out of bed and go take a shower/bath, but he wouldn't move. So I had tried using Testingcheatsenabled true and I was able to at least get him to get out of bed. However, I had to add him to my family to do that.

And I won't even get started on my maids. I fired six maids so far for just one of my families because she would just arrive, go in the laundry room fart and burp a couple of times then collect her pay and leave. And I'm thinking....This lazy &*&&* gotta go.

I had Issac Driver for a butler. He did a pretty good job all around. Problem was that he wouldn't take a bath...ever! The first time it happened, I googled and found out that you need to have a sim initiate a conversation with him, then he'd bathe...fine..obviously yet another EA Fup, but fixable.

Then about a week later, it happens again and the fix doesn't work this time...so now Stinkly McPutrid must die!!! I figure aging him to death is the best way, as it's less likely to mangle up my game than some other options. I get him aged up to elder and lo and behold, he goes poof and disappears in a green cloud of wafting stench. Turns out he has retired. He still calls my sims from time to time...and I'd swear the cellphone emits a few small green tendrils.

My sim family's butler does their job pretty well. 3 meals only per day(exception is when there's a party, which is the time that I will ask one more meal. However, the other 2 families that have butlers don't work well. One family's butler cooks 6-7 times in a day, but aside from that, he's fine. The other one doesn't do anything but read books...