Take it from someone who's in the press business since 1990. Advertising budgets do wonders to press releases. As an insider I take everything the press writes with a lot of salt. In the business it's commonly known that ads are usually sold hand in hand with the promise of a friendly article.

Might sound cynical, but knowing the business I take the toilet woman's opinion over anything the special interest magazines publish.

I have to say, that I have a whole lot of Schadenfreude about EA of all companies falling prey to pre release piracy. Maybe that's one way of making them stop and reconsider, since it hurts them in the only place that matters - their accounts.

As far as I understood the more informed members, it will be closed source. Meaning that modding would be indeed legally impossible.

That's not how it works. The whole purpose of a pirated copy of anything is to make it workable without the limitations the releasing company has introduced. It wouldn't work otherwise, cause Securom or its little siblings would prevent the startup. If Securom was indeed included in that copy, the company has included it, but to no avail, since that pirated thing must have a no cd patch, allowing you to play it without any copy protection.

Alienating the customers is the big gig these last few years. It's certainly not an EA speciality. Bethesda did it with Oblivion, Molyneux did it with the movies and these are only the most prominent examples. Game producing is more like a hit and run than a serious business nowadays. Half baked products are thrown on the market to make the customers pay for the patches which make the manure playable.

But I think it's not only a business decision to prevent modding. They simply have their pants full. The US market is still the biggest market there is. And one of the big plagues of that market are the influencal parental and religious pressure groups making it their business to stick their noses into each and everything.

I'm not that sure about the sheeps. It's mainly the children, who will be the main audience. Not only will there be a fair share of them pestering their parents into buying, but parents will also decide that this is the right game for their kids to play.

I think that's more than enough money to be made by EA. Even more so, since they probably have their first expansion already on the starting grit for Christman sales.

I'm not buying, period. And since EA seems to make modding impossible, I won't even buy the base game.

I'm not buying until they allow CC - not paid CC that is.

But rest assured, they will get their sales. Hordes of children pestering their parents will take care of that, since EA hyped the game pretty well.

Using the search function I found a topic matching my problem, but the user said it was solved without saying how.

So, here goes again:

I can't export certain clothing items due to a texture error. I understand, this is due to some bumps the creator of that package used. At least that's what flows around on other boards.

But is there a possibility to extract the textures for recoloring without using Bodyshop, SimPe or Wardrobe Wrangler? The latter two won't work on my rig, having problems with the Sim version I am running. So I'm pretty much out of fresh ideas. Any help would be appreciated.

Lazy isn't the word I would be using in these cases. And I can't imagine their neat little trick working out in their favor. Bethesda had a try on that kind of approach and reconsidered pretty soon. And Molyneux had to learn it the hard way by losing his company.

I for one will refrain from buying even the base game. In my experience a game without user generated content isn't worth the money. That might be different for a child though. But on the other hand, a child doesn't have money.

I just hope, that the modding community keeps supporting TS2.

All true, but the denominator problem still exists. Even if they sell goodies, they have to sell kids goodies. Out of legal reasons. So, in my book, they will lose a portion of the adult community. I'm not sure how many adults are willing to run a vanilla game with the option to add paid (kids) content. And I'm not sure how many kids are able to constantly pester their parents into buying some of the offered stuff. By closing down the modding community, they join forces with the losers of the business. I don't know of a single company making a fortune out of that kind of approach.

But that may be a calculated strategy. The product loses longevity, thereby opening up the market for something new they want to sell.

But which pie? A developer or distributor can only go for the lowest possible denominator - in this case kids. Aged 8-12. That's closing out the adult community, adult hacks of any kind and a sizeable portion of the adult audience. If that's enough for them, so be it.

But I can give several examples how this kind of strategy backfired. Molyneux' the movies for example. Advertised as modder friendly, turned out to be not modder friendly and dissappearing into oblvion along with its development team. Oblivion's the next one. They also tried their hands on paid content, thereby angering the modding community.

Yes, I can only speak for myself. But a vanilla game of any kind never has been my cup of tea. That's not worth 50+ of my money.

Yeah, I'm aware of the legal implications. And if that close sourced info holds true, EA will have to make do without my financial contribution.

And in my case the primary question is if the game is moddable at all. In the long run I never cared much for vanilla versions. At least not enough to fork out 50+ for something.