More Awesome Than You!

So the game has been out a couple of days now and I'm curious what people think?

The changing seasons are certainly beautiful but I've seen a fair few combusting sims in summer and heard tell of fallen leaves still on the ground in spring. I bought a scarecrow with redeemed festival tickets but actually received the witch/gnome thing instead, so there does seem to be a few glitches or strange features. I've harvested honey but am not sure what to do with the beeswax, maybe it has alchemical uses, although the bees attack was quite hilarious. It seems odd that the festival is accessible every day of the season and not just the actual day off work/school. Oh and I have not seen an alien yet.

So what, in your opinion, has been done well or what needs work, or should never have been included in the first place?

It's nice to have weather at last, although the ep is lacking in assets.

Anyway I've had a whole bunch of problems. Seasons seems determined to kill off the population of my hood. Sims starving to death from the eating contests. Spontaneous combustions all over the place, in some cases getting stuck in a loop that prevents sims or rain from putting it out.

My weather stone has turned invisible, and AM's Nuke option has disappeared, so I'm not sure what to do to get it back. I can't even redeem festival tickets. As far as the merchant is concerned, the ones my sims have in their inventories don't count at all.

I was just playing it a few minutes ago when it froze and had my computer running like crazy.  The game in general has my computer running harder and it takes awhile to load.  I have a quad core and 8 gigs of ram so I am surprised at how hard it is hitting my system.  As far as the actual game itself, I haven't really seen much difference since it starts with summer as the season and the day was sunny.  I was just checking out the festival park when the game froze and it looked pretty cool set up for summer activities.  I still feel like I am going to default to the Sims 2 though for some reason, this game is just missing something for me.

My weather stone has turned invisible too. Is this an AM or EA bug?

I am loving this expansion pack. The glitches I have come across have been caused by out of date mods/hacks. I got most of them updated and everything is going well. For me it is running better than the past expansion.

I have had 7 or so sims burst into flames during the summer. One died. I put 2 out with my sim. I dislike how it does that mainly because the sims are idle outside of their house from the game mechanics. Wish it pushed them indoors.

I can't stop playing it.

Ok I am enjoying it a bit more now that I am getting into other seasons.  I put them down to three each and skipped summer because I had enough of that.  However it started with three days left of summer anyway.  I am in Fall now and the festival is cute. Weird thing happened though- my sim went into the haunted house and came out a fully floating ghost.  I sent her back in and she stayed like that.  A trip to the face painting tent fixed her though. No idea what that was about.

This is also my first full round playing Supernatural as well and I had about three zombies spawn at the side of my sim's house on the full moon night.  Is that normal?

I have a quad core and 16 gigs of ram so I am surprised at how hard it is hitting my system :/

The Seasons Festivals in the park are not interesting at all :/

I never crashed my computer as much since I installed Seasons :/

I love the fact to get seasons in the gameplay : noise of the rain is very realistic :)

The weather stone is fun but a bit limited in actions :)

I'm loving it so far. Unfortunatly it rains too goddamn much, and the summer temps are not believable. 79F is NOT HOT, that is spring weather, not summer! ;) It rained for almost four days straight, until jezzer told me that I could click on the ground to control the weather with cheats on. Dur, I'm a tard.

That cheat is good news. I love the weather but I had seven days of straight rain in autumn and seven days of snow in winter. That's ridiculous, it should be a percentage chance each day. Also, the temps bounce around like a yoyo, there should be more of a relationship between the previous day's temperature and the current day. I understand that in seven days you can't really emulate a curve very well, but it shouldn't just be random.

I also haven't worked out what the damn weatherstone is actually for. My two witches have tried it singly and together and only once did it work - and even then I wasn't sure what it did except give an impressive lightning show.

I was wondering why the festival was running all the time as well. I don't really mind too much, but it's kind of odd. I have the feeling it's going to irk me after a while. I did see an alien during my Seasons test play as the Goths. It came down, said hello to Cornelia, came into her house when invited, and then promptly left. It happened just a few minutes after I'd started playing, but I haven't seen one yet while playing my new family. I think I remember Graham saying something about it being a completely random event, but I could be wrong.

All glitches aside (and there are quite a few that are annoying the ever-loving hades out of me), I'm really enjoying how atmospheric the game is now. I've built my Sims a house on the hillside in Sunset Valley, and the view while raining is killer. And now there's a reason for Sims to wear winter clothes, so hey. Not bad, not bad. I'm a little annoyed over how fake and awful the Leaf Shelter looks, though. Every time I see it in build/buy I wish my Sims were able to take an axe to things. Well, I always wish Sims could take an axe to things, but more so when I see it.

I don't mind the Festival running all the time because it doesn't affect your game unless you let it.  It gives you more flexibility in planning festival outings, and lets you use your holiday day for something else if you like.  My chief annoyance is related to the Soaked moodlet.  If a dog gets the Soaked moodlet, it shakes itself, squashing the queues of every single sim in the room as they react.  What's worse, the shaking decreases the time left on the moodlet, but may not remove it until the dog has done it two or three times, queue-stomping each time.  This was an easy moodlet to avoid with Pets, where all you had to do was make your dog avoid pools and sprinklers, but it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME it rains.

The soaked moodlet annoys me to no end as my sims constantly choose to do outside activities when it is raining (which as some have said above, happens 99% of the time), and then they are dripping water for hours after. I wish they were a bit smarter about the weather because the majority of the time they seem oblivious to it.

The festival is disappointing as all fuck, but the rain is pretty atmospheric.

Atmospheric, not fun. Where the fuck do I get umbrellas? Or raincoats?

Umbrellas are in Buy Mode, under Entertainment, I think, and can be bought from the festival merchants for festival tickets, too. And if you're lucky your umbrella will last longer than one day. They break faster than any community lot toilet.

Surprisingly, at outdoor activities tab. Who'd have thunk it?

I was clever, I made an unbreakable set of sun and rain umbrellas for my fambly, only to find the unbreakable ones last about 2 days longer than the vanilla.   >:(

Could you delete them from your inventory after they broke at least? Because some seemingly have trouble once the "unbreakables" break and they get stuck. They're very delicate, aren't they? Probably made of balsa wood and fine hand-crafted Japanese screen paper.

The weather stone has differing effects depending on which supernatural sim interacts with it.  The effects are not always guaranteed to work.  Vampires will summon fog which allows for activity during the day iirc without the burning up moodlet.  It also allows for sims to become much more likely to accept vampires interactions such as being fed from among other things.  Witches summon rain which gives a boost to mood and causes those in the rain to dance wildly.  Werewolves summon a snow storm which causes collectables to fall from the sky.  It also increases their chance to find rare collectables.  And finally fairies will summon rain and flowers from the sky which helps gardening and makes a rainbow appear.

Vampires and Werewolves seem to have the advantage with the stone.

Haven't tried yet, just noted one was ragged again. Will check it out.

Yeah, they're extremely fragile!

Oh and cheers for the info, Jayroo.

From what I hear you can only try the stone once a day (per world, so if your witch fails, you can't try with your werewolf till the next day) and the failure rate is ridiculous. I haven't tried it myself yet but according to someone over at MTS, the chances of success seems to increase the higher level the supernatural creature is.

That happens in real life, if you don't clean them up.

(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/141/644/7nTnr.png?1309330974)

But yeah, after reading this thread I guess I can safely not bother to acquire this expansion.

The umbrellas are worthless. Walk to the mailbox in the rain with an umbrella, sim will put umbrella away to get mail, then pull out umbrella to walk back to the house. Result - soaked moodlet. They get a tiny bit wet, and the game acts like they wet their pants.

Protip: Sims in swimwear are immune to the soaked moodlet.

We need either a mod that prevents the soaked moodlet from occurring when a sim has an unbroken umbrella in its inventory, or a mod that allows more time to pass before the soaked moodlet appears, to allow for relatively quick outdoor errands, like using the mailbox or the garbage can.

Wish I could join in the fun, but unless I can replace this shitty laptop quickly, I've given up on Sims. At least until Sims 4 comes out.

Which by the way, IS in the works. EA already purchased the domain name and there've been confirmations by EA employees.

Despite all the rainy annoyances, THIS is what I wanted Seasons to give me, and it did so perfectly:

(http://i960.photobucket.com/albums/ae86/jeromycraig/Sims%203%20Stuff/Screenshot-38.jpg)

I agree. THIS is awesome. Seasons is the EP I loved most in Sims 2. The weather, especially the snow is my favorite. I grew up in very cold weather, lots of snow, but, decided to live my adult life in desert heat. I love my game to have the snow...I just don't want to deal with it in meat space.

I like it, its a great EP, but 4 rainbows in hidden springs while it's snowing is a bit much...
Other weather effects are cool though.

I'm a huge fan of the snow.  That screenshot above is about what it looks like out my RL window right now, so it's nice my sims get to enjoy a similar view.

Ran into a pretty frustrating issue though.  My sims live in a multi-level basement house built beneath a converted park, featuring a pond.  In certain of their hallways, some of the time, the sims will stop walking and do an "Oh boy, I'm about to slip and fall" animation, then suddenly teleport outside with a yellow teleportation effect and matching sound, their entire queue cancelled and replaced with a "Go here" icon with "Move Away" as the mouseover text.  Last night I noticed that the spots where this was occuring were directly beneath the pond, which was frozen when it was occurring.

So, apparently frozen ponds leak icewater into basements.  Leaves sticking around until spring I can handle, that's realistic (there's a ton of leaves underneath the snow outside my RL house right now which I'm totally not looking forward to dealing with when it melts), but dammit, winter time is the ONE seasons where basements shouldn't be leaky!

Edit: confirmed by removing pond, which eliminated the slipperiness and teleporting.

I forgot to put a roof on my house somehow. I noticed the first day I played, when it was snowing from the Hunter's Storm or whatever it's called. So I went, and put a roof on. It's about..  a week later? And normal summer. There's no snow on the floor or anything, but the snowing graphic is still showing up indoors. Not annoying enough to rebuild the house or nuke the save, but a bit amusing.

The Sims 4 will just be some shitty BookFace or forced social crap with no AI or any form of simulation anyway. Just like the new Sim City in fact.

I'd like it a lot better if I could fucking get this Sim fucking abducted already. I made a Sim just for that! He's got space rocks and moonstones coming out his ears and Searches the Galaxy when he's hip-deep in snow! What the fuck else do I need to do you weedy green bastards?!

Make sure your aliens have space ships.

Use this mod: http://simsasylum.com/tfm/index.php?/topic/4302-no-less-more-and-extreme-alien-abductions-requires-seasons-ep-update-11-21-12/

This may be a bug, like Kissing_Toast said, often they are missing UFOs. Not sure if this is EA or not.

Well, I used the "ridiculous likelihood of abduction" mod, and the bug-eyed bastards were still no-shows. If they have no ships, how do I find this out and how the hell do I fix it?

How the fuck do you think?  ;)

The first reports about missing UFOs is because Twallan's Overwatch would delete them. The only way to get them back is to delete all aliens and let the game generate new ones.

There does seem to be an Awesomemod issue of some sort. If nothing else it seems to be killing the 'Abducted' moodlet.

I got a good impression.
My world is not up to date, yet, because I installed the last three expansions two weeks ago and have to make up and learn a lot.
But I tested a world updated by Carl (http://www.carls-sims-3-guide.com/).
With all Expansions up to seasons The Sims 3 is now entertaining enough for me to rival the sims 2.
I like the snow and the aliens a lot.
Not being a powergamer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powergaming), I am able to enjoy the new animations and making discoveries (at the moment I try to "solve" the bees without a look at the code, for now...).
Maybe Seasons will be the point for me to start modding the sims 3, as it has been Open for Business before (concerning the sims 2).

They seem to always come and abduct my sims, and I can't cancel out of the stupid queue either. Thanks for giving me a choice, EA, you fuckwads.

Aren't 'aliens' one of the options in the menu? Can't you just turn them off?

If you had a choice then it wouldn't be abduction, now would it?

Dincha know? When an alien abducts you, your body shuts down and blocks out out the entire process causing you not to be probed and be implanted with alien foetus. If it's a "legitimate" abduction that is.

Aliens can't be turned off in game.  Looks like there's a mod for abduction chances though.

There are a few mods that alter the chances, from 100% abduction to 0%. Look around MTS.

I'm really enjoying the weather.  I didn't realize how much I missed it.  Wish there was a bit more of a gradual change; ponds freezing the first day of fall seems a bit on the fast side.  I really wish EA had considered making witch spells interact with sim temperatures better; one sim with magical icicles hanging from his nose and heating up at the same time makes no sense.  Also, aliens.  I've missed them too.

Don't know yet if this will rank as highly as Sims 2 Seasons for me, but it's off to a good start.

I haven't actually played with the value to see its in-game effect, but there's a transition value that you could tweak. It's set to two days by default and I imagine that increasing the value would make the weather transitions more gradual.

I don't know what XML it's in off-hand but it's the same one edited by the longer seasons mod at MTS.

Someone in the room might have squeed the first time it started raining in the game.  Wasn't me, though, because that would be undignified.

One household of mine has been abducted at least 3 times within one hour of playing. That was extremely frustrating. The first time was neat, but the second and third time happened immediately after, and it was kinda aggravating, because I didn't have time to deal with my sim being whisked away for a while, when it did fucking nothing for my gameplay except empty his energy bar.

The weather is nice, and I do think it was probably one of the best sims 3 expansion packs. Which is pretty shitty, because it was shallow gameplay.

EA's expansion packs haven't added many new features to the sims 3. Just some stuff and a *couple* of new interactions, that were already expected because they were on the fucking back cover of the box plain as day. You don't discover anything new or exciting in game yourself.

Also, it adds obvious traits. Like "Loves the cold", "Loves the heat", etc. It's completely cliche, and I feel robbed. EA is such a brilliant, creative company and has the potential to add so much more. And it pains me to say this, because The Sims Franchise is my absolute favorite gaming franchise.

But it's turned cheap. I'm paying less for more, which is why I haven't purchased any other expansion or stuff packs. It's a waste of money.

What's driving me bonkies is that I'm steadily working to get a particular male Sim abducted and pregnant -  and they keep taking his wife instead!

Aliens:  *TROLLFACE*

The male pregnancy 'morph' is dumb. The game just temporarily increases his weight to the maximum end of the scale. That's already in the game. That's nothing new, or exciting to see.

And it would have been neat if EA expanded on basic green skinned, black eyed aliens. They could have done blue or pink with the different color ramps implemented.

In a parallel universe perhaps. In this one, all EA does is buy up the real talent and put them to work on the next BookFace social crap or Battlewasteland 600 sequel, whilst injecting worthless "social" elements into existing IPs and monetising every little thing so you have the 12ish sheep jumping up and down, squeeing with joy because now they can pay real money to bath a virtual lava. Oh, and SecuROM.

Yep. MAXIS was the brilliantly creative company. All EA does is remake remake remake (how many NFL YYYY do we need, really?). I can't think of anything they have actually done, as opposed to acquiring and publishing.

I am pleased that in my celebrity household, in the summer all the paparazzi catch on fire and take turns trying to put each other out/burning to death. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this. I haven't made it to winter but I hope the new paparazzi all freeze. My front yard will be littered with tombstones!

I'm sure that, much like this thread, they won't be allowed to die in peace.

It's not necromancy if it's still on the front page of the forum. Never has been, never will be.

It's necromancy if the thread hasn't been posted to in over a month. The last time anyone bothered posting in this thread was in January and it is now March.

Believe me, if it's only ten posts down the page, it's not disrupting the forum to post and bump it to the top. The whole reason Necromancy is bad is because it's stupid to have stuff resolved a year ago bumped to the top with new dumb questions. That's not the case here. It would be retarded to post a new thread on this when the Seasons thread is less than halfway down the front page. The forum is so dead you should be celebrating anyone who bothers to try to add something, especially if they're someone who was around in the good ol' days and can write in complete sentences, instead of being ragingly bitchy to anyone who posts anything.

Oh, thank you for explaining how shit works in your head. I really appreciate you assuming that everyone else in the world should comport to it.


Or dumb musings and/or pointless comments, regardless of the amount of time that has passed.


Yes, actually, it is.


Your comment is stupid, whether starting a new thread or necromancing an old one. You've contributed absolutely nothing of import or interest.


Your attempt to add "something" has succeeded, although I don't see why anyone should celebrate it.

I was also around in the good ol' days. I'm actually fairly certain that you can find a post from me back in aught five talking about my mom's boob cancer, and seeing a whole hell of a lot of people being supportive about it. This was long before grammar police, AIDES, and SO MEEN. I think I actually precede LURK MOAR. But I've come to understand that a forum changes with its regular members, and it won't necessarily function according to my desires. Since it's not mine, I tend to shut the fuck up about it and move on.

This looks like a job for official MATY rules and policies...
From the FAQs:

This seemed like the obvious post to make in response, yet no one had, so here it is.