I'm another person who will not be buying this game.
The Sims franchise was something I loved, I lived for. EA has taken that and pulverized it into this Zynga-like trash.
The closed and incredibly tiny world was the final straw after being disgusted beyond belief that CaSt would not be implemented. I adore CaSt even though I cannot currently play Sims3 on my computer or have been able to for over a year due to CaSt lag. I'm very much looking forward to buying a rig that will allow Sims3 to coast along at least a lot better. I understand that no lag in Sims3 is an impossibru-ity.
Also, I enjoyed toddlers very, very much. Eventually, I got the mod to quicken their training, but I still loved having them around the houses. Furious they were removed to be implemented into an expansion most surely.
What really gets me are the EA tools that just praise the game no matter what is thrown at them. We can't make a difference in the corporate game world if we just bend over and take their fucking like a good consumer slave.
That appears to be the case in nearly all the societal flaws though. People just take that ramming and plod on with whatever is given to them.

My hopes now are that:

A. My new computer will make Sims3 nicely playable again.

B. Someone else will finally step up and create the Sims clone of our dreams. (I don't understand how this hasn't happened yet)

C. Sims 3 lovers/modders will eventually create a more elegant, modded stand-alone version of Sims 3 that is all the Awesome, minimal EA and will be around for the next 20 years or so.

This object might make the whole ep worth it:
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2809/9140282413_f37a04d641_o.png

Another vote for the fixing of the ghost hunter profession. How they can let that go for half a year without addressing it is beyond irresponsible.

Also, I am interested in using this mod: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=470349&c=1&ht=0&page=3&pp=25#startcomments, but as it's not compatible with the Awesome, there's just no way.
Is there a possibility for an incorporation of compatibility?

I'm trying, REALLY trying to see possibilities with this shitpack but I inevitably get washed with disgust when looking at these items and thinking of how much my beloved game has been crapped upon by EA repeatedly.  The thing that gets me most of all is how I would welcome this kind of crap - bring it on! - if only they would offer a maturely rated expansion as well with real evil, actual vampires, violence(even if cartoony), proper drunken antics and other gloriously "negative" human aspects. (ok, maybe those cupcake tits are a little mature) I couldn't care less about the Katy Perry part and can be chalked up as another person who has no idea who she is other than an eventual nobody. If this was a Felicia Day pack on the other hand - I'd be the first in line. But it's packs like this one that make me(40-male) too embarrassed to tell people how much I love this game anymore.

The only things I see worth it in this pack are the:
A. Jessica Rabbitt dress
B. Coupla other dresses, outfits that could be well usable if not plastered with candy decals.  There's also a skirt that I really hope isn't actually an outfit with the halter top.
C. The little girl candy theme bedset.  

What amazes me is how there's actually no dresses or hairstyles for little girl sims?!?  I mean, if you're going to puke Candyland all over the Sims - then at least give the little ones matching styles.  (oh wait..The Store!(give it time)

This kind of crap, still no Seasons, plus the Big Bad of the game being virtually unplayable for me since Pets overwhelms me with pleasure to see that EA rates worse than Blackwater in the public eye. Not that they give a flying fuck.

While I'm still getting some slowdown in Build/Buy CAST(mostly after being in it awhile), deleting the memories made a marked difference in my general lag and improved my issue.  This mod is really handy to have!
I'm so happy to be rid of the inane, completely fake memories!
No more: "Vicky will never forget how turning her head slightly to the left for the first time was so fucking amazing!"

This is a relatively new issue that I've had and I imagine I'm not the only one.  Also, I posted this on the main site tech help, but here's just so much better.

As of late, When CAST-ing anything in build or buy mode, the game really starts to lag to the point where my mouse doesn't catch up very quickly. I am forced to switch back and forth between build and buy which temporarily fixes the problem until my next CAST change.

This doesn't seem to happen with clothes in CAS, just house decorating.

Never used to be an issue. I THINK it started up about a month ago and is slowly getting worse.

Then I notice the absolutely SICK amount of memories I've managed to get(why the hell did they implement them in the first place?) and have to wonder if it's the memories clogging up the game?

Anyone else having this problem or know the cause?

Oh believe me, the situation with the Billingsly family has been one of much humor and fun for me and despite her fetal addiction, Sarah still maintains a good figure and holds up well!  I was more concerned that this would get completely out of control neighborhood-wide so with your sage advice, I shall attempt the re-naming of the homes and sell off some of those cribs. (Guarantee, she'll get pollinated in the process)
 For being a metropolitan area, Bridgeport is not terribly population-friendly and as I've increased the YA and A lifespans significantly, I foresaw a potential for insanity/borkedness in the future.
 I love the Awesome and quite literally worry that one day you'll tire of this or something else and we'll lose it forever.

Sarah Billingsly is a clown car.

 I know this is my fault.  I placed the cribs and the beds.  Quite a few of them actually, to keep them from moving out to a different home when I switch families. But, I don't switch families anymore.  If I do, Sarah will get pollinated again like she has 10 times.  It's 11 children altogether now because I originally had her adopt my vampire's child.  I have the "more than 8 sims" on because I dig large families/parties and have a computer that can handle it.
 Wasn't expecting 10 though.  Before the patch, every sim had their icon at the side, but now I have to find most of the family members to select them.  I just sent 8 children to boarding school because of the madness.
 I don't do the falcon punch...yet.  I'm thinking about killing the father.

I'm writing, because I know I'm doing something wrong. I've searched and know people have had issues with little reproduction happening in the past.  Saw no point in necromancing those threads. As I mentioned, I don't mind the large families and the majority of my homes have 2+ cribs and plenty of beds in them.  Is that the problem?  I'm wary of removing the beds, because they shift homes so easily to spawn if I do, but, Sarah's brother next door is already on his 6th child...and there are others. 

I know it used to be that if we gave the home the family name, they would be significantly less likely to move away. That doesn't seem to happen anymore. I used to be able to control their pollination better with cribs and such, but now that also seems different.  Is there a limit where I can take out the cribs and they'll stop?  Also, do the # of beds have to exactly match the # of household members?   



 

@Madame Mim:

Simply in response to your list, that's just too short of a lifespan for my sims and I'm wondering how you manage to rotate the families effectively without stress (or perhaps you dig the stress of it) without losing whatever stories/plans you have for them?  Also; the elder stage for 30 years/days? That's a lot of elder time! Mine reach elder and are mostly forgotten except for the occasional favorite and will be the shortest age length next to babies. 

I also plan to just space my age lengths to the ones I find most enjoyable which will be teen/ya - you know, the only time that truly matters in RL. 

I really dig this aspect of the Awesome, actually. It's a great method of control for the neighborhood and is very easy to change.  It helps keeps the sims I don't want reproducing from pollinating in Story mode.  Also, when I put a large number of cribs in the house, the parents appear to have kids more frequently.  I'm not certain this is the case as I haven't properly checked, but it sure seems that way and I like it!

While I thought that moving the CC into the documents folder fixed the "choose household" bork, it did not.  The family continues to gray out and I have to restart the game.  I've tried going into CAS, back to main menu and switching towns.

Also, my fireman continues to be borked as before, I was crashing while running a 2nd fireman char whom I had quit his profession.  Now, my main fireman simply cannot complete his emergencies and nothing checks as complete while I'm trying to do so.  

I've had a lot of time to play this weekend as my internet went out and I didn't experience much more than that, EXCEPT for a sim who vanished - possibly dead from one of the failed fires - and now no one in the family can access their family tree or have any remembrance of him.

I have to say, I have no idea how people enjoy this game without a mod like AwesomeMod anymore as I spent most of my time switching households just to keep my sims trim, not to mention the laundry - the fucking laundry!!!  Does Robotic Hand of God take care of laundry?  I'm sorry if I'm missing info - I'm three days behind in everything.  The fact that the Awesome is officially out now made my day!

As always, I'm overjoyed to be responded to by you, Sir.

And the thing is, you're right, of course!

After I posted this and played again, I gave a second look to the teens in one of my games and they're not as bad as I thought.  I rarely breed with townies and all my sims tend to be good looking - and I recall having some nightmare-get them in surgery now!-sims in TS2 that drove me mad.  I haven't had any like that in TS3 so far.  I find that in-game sims in TS3 look much better than they do in CAS.

With genetics, I crave features skipping generations - which does not appear to occur whatsoever in TS3.  It's Mom or Dad only.  The random eye-color flip drives me mad. The hair doesn't bother me much as, like you say, can be altered at any time.

You also have a great point about the kids in TS2 and after looking around today - everywhere in RL too! It's kind of creepy, now that I've noticed it more how much kids around 7 to 10 years old look like any other kid, M or F! Only notable racial differences seem to make any large effect in facial features.

So now I'm back to just missing weather, mostly.  *edit* And the occasional puppy.

I do still love TS2 and there are things I miss about it.  I especially miss the genetics.  They really need to get that down better for a game like this and the sims in TS3 tend to look VERY similar until they reach young adulthood.  I hate that. I used to live for my sims in TS2 to reach the teen years to see how they turned out because they were all so different from each other.  Plus, the teens were PRETTIER in TS2 - both female and male. In TS3, they all have that exact same look.  And forget about the children in TS3 - you can rarely see a difference between male and female at all. 

However, while I still have all my TS2 and still have tons of stuff I haven't even tried yet in that game, I haven't played it in ages.  2 big reasons being I don't have a No CD crack/patch for Sims2(WCIF a good one that covers everything?) and the game takes 30 minutes to load.

I love - absolutely love - the design tool in TS3 and that is still the most amazing thing about it to me.  While I agree that houses can be tedious to make, what I like to do is: Make the house - furnish quickly - get playing - and then, as time goes by, change room by room as I get inspired.  I don't advise completely creating a house right away - it's just too tedious.  But soooo much more fun when you do it as you go.

The traits also far outweigh the "personalities" of the sims in TS2, but they lack in their animations and abilities.  They should be more fleshed out.  I want my sim snobs to walk around with more snobbery and refuse friendships with poor sims.  I want my couch potatoes to NEVER exercise, no matter what we tell them, and evil...don't get me started. Ambitions is helping that a bit, but the profession "desires" are getting rather old, rather quickly.

When playing my Architectural Designer, I've had 2 out of about 6 jobs not go well.  One was displeased that the shower I placed was inaccessible (whoops) and the other noticed when my sim sat down to watch television and was told: "If you have time to do that, I might just take some of your pay away. "  Or something to that degree, anyway. I thought that was pretty cool. Also, I had a third job, where the customer thought it was "OK" but wasn't that impressed.  So all in all, I'm finding that realistic and cool.  I'm also quite comfortable with the job-a-day factor.  What annoys me is how a female designer gets time off for pregnancy/maternity leave.  Take the baby with I say!

That all said, I'm having better luck with the crashes thanks to A: Moving the CC into the documents folder and B: I got the 4GB patch from here: http://www.ntcore.com/ which I believe has helped some. However, I still had a crash while playing 2 sims that were visiting a neighbor lot.  

This game is not Change Household-friendly at all.  I've had multiple freezes and several crashes just from trying to do that.


*EDIT*  The Changing Household issue may be directly connected to the CC not being in the Documents/Mods folder.  So far, so good anyway.

I am also having the issue where the option gets lost to switch households.  I did not have this problem prior to Ambitions unlike others have mentioned.

Also, there is an issue with at least the firefighter career that has been noted by others on the EA forum as well.

My initial, CAS-created firefighter played perfectly fine.  When switching households to an in-game char that became a FF, the new FF could not complete his 1st emergency.  He put out the fires, but this was not acknowledged.
The alarms in the fire station continued to sound and repeated attempts to "respond to emergency" fell out of queue.

I've tried quitting his job and accepting a new FF position, returning to the main menu/restarting the game, going into edit town and deleting/replacing the alarms. After replacing the alarms, he was able to respond to the emergency which is now followed immediately by a CTD; both after editing and after restarting.  I'm rather concerned about that.  

While I currently have an assbuttload of CC still in my original Sims 3 folder, the only mod I have at this time is the updated censor.

I think I've worked through this after about 7 more CTD(all access violations reading the same address).  I do not advise playing more than 1 fireman at a time for now.  I had to make the 2nd FF quit completely, go back to original family and wait for the 1am change, fight fire, switch chars to the wife while preventing him from returning after 1am that day and then everything seemed fine.  I also had him collect his service award in case that had something to do with it. Also, deleted script and composition caches somewhere in the middle of that mess.  It's weird.

A ton of thanks, jeromycraig.  That's exactly what needed to be done.  Now...does the content go into the newest folder then?  I imagine this answer lies around the site so I'll get to looking.

I actually tried putting it in all 3 areas, but it just didn't work.  I did try putting it next to them.  There must be something I'm doing wrong.

I realize this isn't exactly the place to ask for basic tech help with the game, but I have tried the Sims3 tech forum and received exactly 0 answers in a day.  Maybe I'll at least get yelled at here or something which is better than no response at all. (In honesty, I've found quite a bit of help here - so I mean no disrespect)

Recently, I encountered the blue lot horror in my Riverview and nothing seemed to make that go away, so I finally deleted my main game. Aside from re-installing, I'm completely gutting and re-doing my game and putting all the store files/other downloads into a much neater .dbc collection.  I'm starting a fresh - all custom by me SV town.  I thought this would be a good time to pop in HELS before I do the .dbc files and other organizing.

I keep Sims3 and WA in my E drive folder with the intention of making that entire 250gb drive devoted only to my Sims.  When I try to install HELS into E -  whether under Sims3, EA(WA) or just plain E - It refuses to install and states that doing so may cause instability to my system.  

It tries to default to C/EA where my Spore game is currently residing (until I cannot bear that goddamn game any longer)  Should I allow it to install there? Is there a better way? I no longer use the launcher to play my game, of course.

Thanks!  I will definitely get those.  Zazazu - I am so sorry about your name fail.  I had it spelled correctly, but then saw the previous post quote from Regina and thought I was in the wrong! 

Zazazu:  Where did you get that badass two-story window?

@morriganrant:  Strangely there are 2 or 3 small homes not affected by the blue square blues.  *EDIT* Upon re-loading, when I first go into the game, the lots DO appear sunken.  They are blue and at first, I can access my family sims and select them, but I cannot make them do anything but change clothes.  When I go into edit town mode, I lose all ability to select them or their house again.  Hope?

@Slymenstra: I do think I have a small CC problem with duplicated CC found in both of my .dbc files.  I believe this occurred by foolishly downloading a home/sim.  Something we used to be able to do without too much worry.

@CLmeow: Please tell me how to save this family to the bin because I can't seem to select them even though they are the current family in the saved game! Maybe I missed something.  I will load and try this because I'm certain this neighborhood/save is a wash.

I fear I may have lost my main family.

After trying the above methods, I was, in fact, able to create a new game that shows Riverview in all its shining glory.  However, when I try to load up my main save, the majority of homes remain blue. This makes me blue because it's been a month since I've been able to play.  I'd be fully willing to relocate my family to Sunset Valley if there's a way and simply delete that save.  Anyone know how?  I can't access them in-game. 

Ironically, when this all began, I was about to let the Dad of the family be killed off by the Curse.  In a way, he has escaped my sordid plans for him! I hate starting over.

Well, you're definitely on to something here, Grimma, because my houses do show up in Sunset Valley.  I just play Riverview almost exclusively so I never saw that as the potential issue. (It's just so much better)

I discovered that offending file through my main search in the computer. Thank you for typing it out completely!

I tried following your steps mentioned in your post but skipped "2.) Extract files from Riverview.sims3pack with the Delphytool for that purpose" as I didn't have that sims3pack handy. but that is apparently an important step because it still did not work for me. When I find that sims3pack, I will try this again.

Although, I am tempted to just forget about Riverview altogether as I worry this will be a continuing source of failure with the upcoming patches and packs.  But, I do love Riverview... torn.

*Update*  Ok - This time I followed your instructions completely and thoroughly and yet the blue lots remain...

I will try this again tomorrow - must sleep now - Thank you for your help here - I will get to the bottom of this yet!

I like that tool and I love your avatar, but while I did find some corrupted/conflicting packages, I continue to have this issue after editing.

I'm certain it occurred when I updated the download manager and that just baffles me.

I deleted all the extraneous files I saw in my main folder and also looked for changes that took place on that day but no luck so far.