This is what's wrong with TS2 IMO.

[Tomkat]

It comes down to a lack of love for the game.  Sure its a multi-million cashcow now... but I was thinking about it this weekend.... do you still get that anticipation feeling every time a new EP is released? No? well welcome to this thread.

When TS 1 was released I read all the reviews I could find...up to that point I never owned a "real" game...and was excited and it was a huge deal for me to finally find a game like this with all the possibilities it held... So I saved up and bought it...and my sister, mom and I were like monkeys sitting in front of the PC ...going "hey!! look what he's doing! He's still alive? oh look....he even goes to the bathroom..."
After that when the first ever ep (livin' large) was released I was ecstatic... I never anticipated it...so it was glorious... I begged everyone for it for my birthday...and even shivered when i installed it... (yes thats embarrassing I know... but there is a point...)

Well fastforward a few years... makin magic is out...everyone knows that TS2 is looming... but still the unbelievable fanbase this little game created was enough to make even that profitable.  It was fun and entertaining and original... I didn't even mind the bugs.  With all the minute details and extra thought that went into the series...or at least the first few EPs (for arguments sake) it seemed a great day when TS2 was out....BUT...

The developers have lost that magic the first one had.  There is no love for this game anymore.  The idea is there,,,and it works, but there's absolutely no feelings or familiarity towards it.  Think about TS1....quirky...fun... extraordinary... TS2: tries very hard... bugs all round...EA sells out... lies/cheats/steals/coverups... all the signs that TS2 has become more of a business tool than something for fun... were all just the idiots that slurp up the EPs in the hope that it'll be any good... and it never is that good... remember Livin Large? that EP had about as many new things as a TS2 stuff pack... but it satisfied enough people to spawn more EPs...and in the end another season of sims (TS2)...and riding on that even TS3!.

My point after it all is... do you still tingle at the thought of a new EP, or do you just think "oh that looks...okay"?  When you install the new Ep...do you shiver with excitement to see what they came up with? Or do you just worry that your hacks are not compatible and "damn this thing takes long to install"?

There's a major lack of personal interest and love and caring and general good will towards the new generation sims.  The business part has crushed the life out of it all.  

After all that...(if you made it through )
Whats your opinion?

[Tenshii~Akari]

Personally, the joy of the new installments for the game ended when the bugs started hitting people's computers full force... and with all the stuff going on with BV, H&M, and the teen SP having SecuRom, I no longer have that child-like desire for anything new from them.  I'm just to scared to take the risk of messing up my laptop, because I won't be able to afford any new technology for the next 4-5 years, maybe far more than that... and with all the SecuRom issues, lies, and just plain BS happening at the moment, I'm not taking the risk of having over $1,100 go down the drain.  (My parents would be pissed if that happened, seeing that I'm still in school with a butt-load of loans to pay off in the future... :pale: )  So yeah, I have to agree to a point that I've lost my passion and drive for any future PC games made by EA, Sims or otherwise.  The game is still fun at times though, so I'm just going to enjoy the four EPs I have as long as I possibly can.

It's sad that there's a bunch of "major" patches for every single EP and SP EA has made for Sims 2.  Is it even normal for games to have these huge patches to fix (almost) everything they've missed the first go around?  I think not.  Maybe a small patch or two, but not ones that are as big as 50-60MB+ to my knowledge.  :?  (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.   )  I realize that Sims is a very complex game, but if they had actually hired some decent people to test the game thoroughly, they wouldn't have to waste time to release a patch, which by the time they have it prepared, modders in the community would have already fixed a lot of the issues.  :angry7:

But, like it has been said before, they just want to keep on getting richer... as long as people keep buying their products, they could care less on how we feel about the game now... :snorting:

[MaryH]

I have only the base game. I do not anticipate getting any of the EP's in the foreseeable future because of the bugs each and every one has-from the start. I work for a living and cannot afford to upgrade my computer every time EAMaxis decides to have a little problem with their quality. I refuse to fund their incapacity to fix the problems they have with their testing crew, and I refuse to destroy my computer for their sake. It is only a game, and it will stay a game that is highly dubious in content and quality for everyone until EA/Maxis decides to concentrate on their product, not their profit.
Unfortunately at this time, they seem to be fixated on making money from very suspect software to sell to a willing public that will put up with their crap for as long as they produce it.
It is too bad they turned into a conglomerate with no passion for good work, only money. It could have been a lot better if they had stayed true to their goal of making a good game.
I personally would love to have all the EP's, all the stuff packs, but am very unwilling to have to replace my entire system to meet their demands for speed and capacity. They could have done better, and they chose the low road. To hell with them.
The Sims 3 will fail unless they get their act together fast about these issues, and produce something that will actually be worth the money.

[BeosBoxBoy]

I bought TS2 the day it was released, rushed home and spent 6 weeks fighting with the installer. It didn't like my £2300 professional grade 3D-rendering card, never mind that this card has features that make even the newest cards by ATI and NVIDIA laughable... EA's tech support was beyond worthless.  I could have written their entire troubleshooting tree without ever having played the game, so being told to un-install and re-install was ludicrous. Realising I would never get my money back, in a fit of geek desperation, I went to the closet and dug out a crappo 32 MB SVGA card and installed it... the game installed without hesitation...  I was annoyed, but relieved it finally installed.  So I pulled out the crap-card and moved forward...

TS2 crashed and vomited time and time again over the sound card driver, took 2 weeks sorting that out... now had the game 8 weeks and still not played it...

Finally I get the game going, I immediately want to vomit from the hideous shape of the adult male... it looks like a previously driven condom.  Then there is the freakish face assortment.  And the bizarre necks.  Then I see the elders, and it is bin-bag city.  I spend something close to 6 hours figuring out the differences between the beta I tested and the shipped version... they are countless and mind-boggling for being absent.

So I sit myself down and think...  how can I make this better?  I wade into the middle of MTS2 and discover no one knows a god damned thing about making custom content, there's not even a means to recolour in-game objects, and at that time, not even a means to make new walls and floors.  I get righteously pissed. close the browser and don't play the game again until University EP is released...

Uni EP was my own passage by fire.  The installer on it bogged 7 times out of 8 tries, each time doing vile things, like seeming to install, but not.  One time it un-installed TS2 but installed Uni... try running your game that way...

I finally get the bastard installed and wade into it again.... 5 gigabytes of error logs later... I pick up the phone and call the VP of EA in charge of shareholder relations and inform him I am sending a parcel to be presented to my fellow shareholders...  It was a 30 page QA report on the Uni EP accompanied by a cover letter stating why I believe EA's current management was making careful measured strides to lose it's base market for its best selling game ever with a 5 GB data DVD full of error logs, memory dumps, etc.

for the next 5 months, EA said there was nothing wrong with the Uni EP, effectively calling the 1000s of people who filed bug reports, contacted tech support, and complained on the BBS liars.... It still took mobs of angry fans shouting at Tim LeTourneau during his European tour to pump the game to get a bug patch made for Uni... then the bug patch managed to screw up 3 times as much as it repaired, there was a 2nd Uni patch within 24 hours, and a 3rd within 2 weeks... just in time for Nightlife and the "hot coffee" scandal

For no particular reason, EA chose to change the manner that the censor blur operated and incorporated it into patches for all versions of the game... one more slap in the face for the fan base...  Crammyboy and Quaxi came up with solutions in fairly short order, but they should never have had to do it.

Nightlife had a catastrophic bug... vampires bit Miss Crumplebottom and buggered the Objects.package, causing a cascade of file corruption in the save files...  Joy for all.  The mucked around and flipped us the finger while they pretended to need to research the problem...  How you develop a piece of software for several months and not do any testing is beyond me... but it was the foreshadowing of things to come.

Next into the grist-mill were the stuff packs... Satan's own crap-code to bung up your game.  Because they need to be base game compatible, they are built on the base game's source code, this leads invariably to bugs... like un-installing all your EPs, or bunging up the game so that you can't use any EP clothes or content... the list goes on and on and on until I hit the wall with Pets EP.

The Pets EP was a blatant lie from start to finish.  You know, Unleashed for the original Sims had about 10 times as much new content, was just about equally buggy, and expanded the neighbourhood to 3 times its original size; bugs or no, Unleashed gave you MORE than Pets did...  The Pets EP pisses me off to this day.  I really want to slap anyone who defends that EP.

More craptastic stuff packs and Seasons EP, I like Seasons, it's a bit lame, but at this point I expect lameness from this game, lameness on a galactic scale.  In all truth, 72 hours into the actual play of this game, I was over it.  I hate EA with a passion I usually reserve for fundies and republicans, I have wasted 100s of hours trying to discover how to customise a game that was advertised as "easier to customise than ever before".  I have devoted as much time in this effort as I might to a 40 hour per week job.

Yeah, the love is gone.  And if I could, I'd drop a slug in the head of ever man and woman at EA.  That just might make up for the lost days and weeks from my life I have wasted trying to fix their shit code.

[MaryH]

Beosboxboy, you should send this post to the VP of customer relations and tell them that you're a modder for the Sims2 community (as well as a moderator for MTS2) and tell them that this is the general outlook for their sophisticated fan base; the noobies don't know this, but they'll learn.
I wonder how many people have actually destroyed their computers from this game and it's massive bugs?
I think it's a lot, but they're not talking.
As for me, my hubbie (who is a master electronic and computer tech) has had headaches just installing my base game and getting the specs right for it..and he had to turn down the CPU speed to make it all work..from a system that was patched together from parts he found. He's a genius when it comes to doing that, but I doubt most people are when they have problems. Not everyone can build a computer from scratch and have it work properly the first time. I'm very lucky this way, but not everyone is.
But I won't make him try to fix something that's screwed up from the start. He has better things to do.

[Chaavik]

You hit the issue right on the nail, Beosboxboy with a very well-written post about the problems most of us encountered upon buying these EPs and installing them.

I didn't start playing TS2 until about 2 or 3, maybe 4, months after the base game was released because at the time, I was having a blast with TS1.

Until Maxis or whatever they're called now can prove they have people with intelligence and two opposable thumbs can do a better job on the future EPs for TS2 and maybe TS3, I will reconsider. I don't know why Maxis allowed such a craptastic EP, Bon Voyage, to be released in a pathetic state with lots of bugs and incompatibility issues to the public. They obviously didn't have a good QA team for BV..

At least they didn't screw up Sims 2 Castaway for PS2..

[Sam the T-man]

They couldn't afford to, as you can't patch a console game. Not PS2 or previous, anyway.

@Yakov: Have you ever directed these verbose complaints to the guys themselves (like the Maxoids, or even higher if you were a tester)? If so, what was the outcome? If not, give it a go, they should see them. Re. Pets: This is your personal opinion. Slap me if you want, but I'm quite happy with it (mind you, I love animals and wish I could keep a cat myself). Yes they could have added more, maybe I've just been lucky with my EPs, but I haven't had half the problems others have had with that EP. Apart from the notorious flashing blue of course, but that's so widespread Pescado's added a fix to his lot debugger. The other bugs mentioned are indeed unforgiveable - I wonder myself sometimes if they even have a QA team. They should be paying the modders for fixing their mistakes! I wonder if MSam's still looking for volunteer beta testers...?

[BeosBoxBoy]

Sadie - I most assuredly did address my reports to the software engineers at EA, and to my knowledge the Maxoids are not in any way really connected to EA but all employed by the "web presence and tech support" 3rd party service provider contracted by EA, like Clientlogic and other call centre companies.  I sent my complaints and reports directly to EA corporate, the BBS is a facade of lies.

[Sam the T-man]

Oh wonderful, so not even the Maxoids have much to do with the game? So, this is probably a silly question, but what happened when you sent off your reports? I suppose hearing anything (promising) back would be expecting too much...? :dontknow:

[abaris]

Sadie - I most assuredly did address my reports to the software engineers at EA, and to my knowledge the Maxoids are not in any way really connected to EA but all employed by the "web presence and tech support" 3rd party service provider contracted by EA, like Clientlogic and other call centre companies.

Most likely hardly-at-all-payed-near-enslaved students like with any other major corporation. It's pretty useless to adress some helpline since these folks usually know less about the issues than the caller. It's the same with phone companies or ISPs.

[BeosBoxBoy]

Oh wonderful, so not even the Maxoids have much to do with the game? So, this is probably a silly question, but what happened when you sent off your reports? I suppose hearing anything (promising) back would be expecting too much...?

Nothing shocking to me, I have been at times tech support for any number of companies like (but not limited to) @Home broadband, AOL-UK, Iomega, HP computers, and Apple computers.  As for having any reply from them, I got a one paragraph form letter with a facsimile signature printed by the laser printer thanking me for my interest. Not one word more.

Most likely hardly-at-all-payed-near-enslaved students like with any other major corporation. It's pretty useless to adress some helpline since these folks usually know less about the issues than the caller. It's the same with phone companies or ISPs.

That would be the sort, I was one myself once upon a time....

[Hidden~Secret]

my game crashes like crazy,hard to load and i'm just ARG!!I mean I spend my days trying to find a virus that was just one tiny thing wrong with one of the NPC's.The love is lost.I have been playing the game for about a year and my computer is ready to get into a grave and die!I would LOVE to come up to those EA guys and have them play the game on their "special" bug free computer that they say tests out everything for the Sims 2 and have them look at it and be frustrated and have them call Tech Support for the Sims 2 and have them be put threw miserie.

[abaris]

I would LOVE to come up to those EA guys and have them play the game on their "special" bug free computer that they say tests out everything for the Sims 2 and have them look at it and be frustrated and have them call Tech Support for the Sims 2 and have them be put threw miserie.

That's one of the standard answers you get when adressing problems with any game company. It's always your computer being at fault, even though you can run other applications without any problems.

[xTERRIx]

really, finding this thread popped soooo many memories into my head. in my game, i can't take screenshots because they turn out to be just plain black, even in the sims 2 files! also, this weird "hidden neighborhood for pets" pops up and makes my game crash every time i try to enter it! not only that, it replaced my Pleasantview neighborhood..............(just when i was torturing Angela Pleasant)

[vanessa]

I have all the EPs,no SPs as I realy don't like the Maxis clothes,hair and furnitures that much.I played the Sims 2 on a poor PC at the beguining,failed to install Uni so I had to buy a new PC.I don't have so many problems,just some lags since Bon Voyage,and I have 10 GB of dl/s.It runs fine but I'm deleting Group cache and the Log content every day.
I still love this game.and I'm still waiting for the next EP,and when I'm getting bored I play sims1 for a day or 2.Yes,Maxis makes a lot of money,but I don't care.Every bussiness on this planet tries to make as much money as they can,what can I do?
I hope I can keep my love for the game alife,it's realy up to my imagination,lol.
Beos,you have a real sense of humor,your description made me laugh ,lol.