I miss most of what people have mentioned as well.  I really miss attraction/dating though.  The romance bit seems a bit boring.  Connected to that I miss ACR (which I know is TwoJeffs, not EA).  I hate micromanaging my sims love lives.  It does seem odd that you have to go through the whole dating rigamarole to kiss your spouse.  Also, I'm the only one I'm sure, but I miss pets.  I'm the one who actually liked that expansion. 
Someone pointed out how annoying it is that sims can't play guitar til' they are teens.  Why can't child sims garden?  As a kid, weekend weeding was a normal part of my chores.  I said I would use hacks and stuff for awhile, but I already have awesome mod, default skins textures, and default eye textures.  Still, I am finding it just as addictive as I found first Sims 1, then Sims 2.

Perhaps not terribly relevant, but I just recieved my Macro coffee mug.  Arrived really fast, and was packed to resist breakage in case of being thrown around like a beach ball.  Seriously, way more bubble wrap than mug.  So, two gifts in one!

Of course Synctimer continues to tick along just fine with Inge's special no days added patch and heirloom cake (aging on of course).

My sim's butler did this too.  I thought it was pretty funny actually.

I've actually had very little borkage in my AL game.  I am playing Belladonna Cove for the time being.  Slowly adding in approved hacks and limited CC.  However, I have run into a little problem with my game crashing every time I try to place any downloaded lot.  I choose a premade house, try to place it, game crashes.  Have tried with two different residential lots.  Anyone have any ideas why this might be happening?  In the meantime I'm going to erase all my downloaded lot, download one new one, and attempt to place that one, on the off chance the install corrupted them all.

My Riley and Cho apartments were the same.  I tried to play Cho and could see into Riley's apartment and see what he and his daughter were doing.  Also, Cho's visitor would continually try to talk to people in Riley's apartment.  So I exited out and tried playing Riley, and it was the same.  So, I decided that was way too borked, and had Riley ask Cho to move in with him.  She accepted but I could still see both apartments.  So I moved them out as one family unit.  Going to test out their apartments on new sims today.  Hopefully it was just Eaxis trying to be clever with their whole single parent romance that messed it up.

I think Spore is very interesting.  Groundbreaking maybe.  A lot of cool game stuff is being innovated and will probably carry on in future games.  However, I don't think it looks fun to play.  Kinda like back in the day when I was this huge RPG nerd, Cyberpunk was much more fun to create characters for than to actually play.  So, while it looks pretty cool, I played around with the free version of the creature creator for about a half an hour, then removed it from my computer.  I'm done with Spore now.

Posted by: lefty
"Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. I love to keep track of the playables. I have a program that acts like a wiki that I edit, with a page for every playable (and any townies that donate their genetic material but aren't moved in) detailing things about that sim. I have seperate pages with the pictures I took with captions for myself as I get down to generation 5 and say "hey, doesn't this sim act a lot like that one sim way back when? Let me check..." and a detailed family tree made in photoshop, along with lots of misc info on my sims. I dare say I almost have as much fun working on the "database" as playing! I get a little OCD with it I think."

That sounds like a pretty cool program.  Know where I can get one like that?  I keep track of my playables too, badly.  My desk is covered with scraps of paper - but only because the notebooks weren't working out.

Well, just to add my personal experience.  No problems w/ patch #1, no problems w/ patch #2, then patch #3 stopped towards the end of installing, said there had been an error and I should reinstall Freetime.  I thought perhaps there had been a problem w/ my download, so I redownloaded it and tried again to install it.  The same error.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Freetime which completely reset my game.  Now I have no patch at all.  Someone said that Patch #3 didn't install well over Patch #2.  If that's the case perhaps I should try installing Patch #3 now.  But if Patch #3 just sucks, well perhaps I should skip it.
Not worried about Securom because it's already on my computer.

Not usually one for weighing in on completely non-sim-related topics.  However, my husband is sorta random about facial hair.  Seems like every 2 or 3 years he decides he is tired of shaving, likes beards, or perhaps he doesn't want to see his chin anymore and he grows a beard, sometimes a goatee.  I prefer him clean-shaven because I like his face, but I never object at all.  He is fastidious about cleanliness and it is his damn face.  He can do what he wants with it.  Besides, after awhile I start to like how he looks with the beard.  Then when he gets tired of the beard (6-12 months later) and shaves it off it takes awhile to get used to him without it.  He also alternates depending on how he feels between glasses and contact lenses - which is more visually jarring because I spend time wondering what's different all the time.

AHA! That is it! I've had those for a long time, and it didn't occur to me that those would cause a problem! Thanks...it would have taken me forever to have gotten around to those.
And can I say again....Thanks.

Not sure about how the game chooses the one hobby.  Monica Bratford in my game is active (7), moderately playful(5), and has low interest in Sports (1), yet her one hobby is sports.  I would have thought her interest or lack therof would have factored.

So, I've been playinging with Freetime for roughly two days.  I ran into a couple problems.  I replaced hacks that could be replaced, took out ones that are being updated and left in the rest for testing purposes.  Something interfered with my novel-writing, but I've narrowed that one down (the usual way, taking stuff out, and putting stuff back in, much reloading and testing).
However, the other problem I'm a little stumped on.  I'm still in the midst of testing and trying out solutions, but I thought I'd mention it here on the off chance someone here had a similiar problem and knows how to fix it.  The mysterious problem is that my Robot making bench is no longer clickable.  The cursor becomes small and grayed out when I hover it over the robot bench.  Not sure what's going on there.  None of the hacks I have in would seem to affect that at all, but as I said I'm still working on it.  Anyway, just checking in case someone knows.  Not holding my breath or anything.  Still testing out stuff.

LOL, course' the fact that you made that connection and I thought it was funny, makes us both either really old...or huge fans of Tom Hanks...

Ah, well that is a bit different.  This mother was actually naming her daughter Emily, but didn't want to spell it the "boring" way. 

Well, my parents are from Hicksvile (not the actual town name), and I have noticed a couple of trends.  Misspelled names, "clever" altering of names, and of course stripper names.  My two favorite disasterous names I heard there were -
Diamond (pronounced Die-Min), and Emma-Lee...which the mother explained to me slowly, using small words, so that I could understand how clever she was.  Traditionally, you could go with those Bobby Lou kind of names, but these days you're most likely to find teen moms giving stupid spellings to trendy new names.  I like this naming site for bad names for sims.  Also, sometimes I read it just because it's funny.
http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/

On the EA downloader note, I've noticed that since BV all the stuff packs I got via the downloader have disappeared.  They do not give the option to uninstall, and yet the downloader does not give me the option to reinstall, reading that they are already installed.  So, I picked up used copies of a couple of them and installed them that way.  Yeah, I spend stupid money on this game.  My working theory is that the new game searches for CD codes, and not finding them, disables the pack.  So, I would reccomend not downloading from EA downloader.  Not that anyone but me is that stupid apparently.  Although, I have learned my lesson.

Okay, this thread supported what I have suspected.  I recently downloaded, tried to place, then deleted a bunch of beach lots.  Ah well, guess my sorry building skills will be put to the test. Also, I wish we could have 2x3 beach lots.  Apparently that's too small. 

No, actually, my neighborhood ended up with the Ottamas, the Ramaswamis, and that Roseland guy with his dog.  I decided to make them extras as I decided to keep your custom families as extras while I have my own Royal Kingdom challenge families that I created.  Yeah, I play everyone, and no doubt my gene pool will thank me for it later. 
But, back to the question, I decided to use the Any Game Starter so I could have an independent game from my usual game, but also so I could drop Bon Voyage, as well as nearly all the Stuff packs that I didn't have any use for in my medieval game.  I also ended up with some of the Seasons NPCs like the garden club people, but whenever I see them I simply use dizzy's change any outfit (or whatever it's called) to fix them.  Really, with only the one neighborhood and only the medieval CC, it loads ridiculously fast.  Well, longer than my husband would put up, but much faster than my previous 24 minute load time.  That was when I had about 6 custom neighborhoods of various types, all expansions, and about 19 gigs of CC on my game.  Now that I use the A.G.S. to have my independent theme game it's about 2- 3 minutes, tops.

Something that may be helpful with designing a WWW neighborhood is to remember that the Victorian Era, the Wild West and the Civil War era all kinda overlap in places.  So if you're not too much of a stickler for dates then elements of any could fit into one nieghborhood.  The difference in a cowboy's residence and a governor's manor would be vast, with the cowboy's easily using some medieval themed furnishings and the governor's manor using high victorian stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_west

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era

If and when you release the WWW neighborhood, I may use Numenor's Any Game Starter to use it twice.  Once for my Firefly/Serenity neighborhood, and once for a Weird West Neighborhood.  Maybe some of these articles can be inspiring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28TV_series%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_west

For the record though, if one of two of the townies or service sims has a broken outfit, I have no problems with fixing it manually.  I think it's a pretty cool idea to make these theme nieghborhoods though.  I've been doing it myself for years, just not nearly as well.

Just wanted to add my thanks.  I've been playing Scotia for about a week now.  Since I did the complete reinstall, and discovered the joy of Numenor's Any Game Starter, I figured I'd try out your custom hood.  Wanted to before, but I already had a Medieval hood then.  Anyway, it's going great.  The Goldenbough family booted out the resident Royal family, and renamed the kingdom Golden Valley.  Put me down as another who is looking forward to the Wild West neighborhood.

Well, I'd like to vote that I don't hate them, but I don't prefer them.  So if they come with a downloaded house, they don't bother me enough to not use the house, but given I choice I'd rather have something else.  Like Targa's stuff, or stairs that take up too much room.  They work, and all, but to me they look funny.

Odd note on ladybugs.  My family is from small-town California, and in the Spring ladybugs migrate through there.  They congregate in a huge dry riverbed apparently in the hundreds of thousands.  Local boys go and scoop them up, put them in containers and sell them to farmers.  So while ladybug colonies do not conjure up the frontier days, I think it wouldn't be totally unrealistic for wild west types to utilize them in similiar ways as modern day california farming areas.  I like the ladybug house in-game and do not get lag w/ them.

YIKES! I wish I hadn't gone to that website.  Couldn't finish watching the video either, because the song was making my head implode.  I realize I could have turned off my speakers, but the agony made me reach for the quickest fix.  Exit.

Sounds good.  The descriptions sound cool. I also like the idea of it being a single job rather than two.  Increasing skills seems like it wouldn't be too important for play reality.  Sometimes the skills needed to move up career ladders doesn't make sense anyway.  I mean, why does the Mayor need cleaning skills?  I like the idea of using the teen/elder pay scale. It would keep them poor, but not so poor that I would be forced to cheat to prevent them from starving.  I use custom careers sometimes, and I do tax my medieval sims using Monique's payment mod.