I see. So as far as I see it the basic list of mods to download for beginners (we might want to put this into a separate thread to help people who are trying to figure that out, I tried looking for one but couldn't find it) are:

*Tarlia's clean neighborhoods for if you want to use the Maxis neighborhoods
*the mod to prevent vampires from biting Mrs. Crumplebottom
*the mod that limits the number of NPCs the game can generate (to slow the game reaching critical file mass)
*Mootilda's Hood Checker
*Batbox Debugger (this fixes the stuff found in the hood checker right?)
*SimPE

anything else?

What I meant is that how could the game make millions of dollars if it was released basically unfinished and messed up? I've never heard of a game being released with major, game-ruining bugs before (although The Sims is the only game I play, so maybe that's just my ignorance). In the Sims 1 the only way to get a bug was to actually mess with the game using cheats, like leaving move objects on for too long or marrying Mrs. Crumplebottom. But it's not like deleting Sims is an esoteric thing to do, it's a major part of playing the game! And this game has been out for 8 years and they never bothered to fix it? It just boggles the mind.

Or maybe nobody ever played them long enough for anyone to notice ongoing corruption. And why would you hear about it if you didn't play the game, anyway?

It's a corporation and somebody decided that fixing the problems was not cost-effective.Corporations do much, much worse things in much, much more critical areas (like, say, war zones) all the time, and still keep their government contracts.

It's advisable to find gameobjects.package in your latest EP folder and set it to read only. It prevents some bad things from happening, like a bug with a toy car.

There's a detailed wiki thread about game corruption created from this topic:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...Hood_Corruption

I don't know why the game is bugged, but I suspect it wasn't possible for testers to find all the bugs and see their long-term consequences. Why not, the game is huge and complex, and it's probably much more complex in programming than any shooter or an RPG. Maybe not because of difficulty, but because there's so much of everything that you'd forget what led to what in your own code.

In case you're curious, thismustbethecase, EA's errors in coding The Sims 2 are not even the worst example of games programming in gaming history (though they are, taken together, unusally poor). TV Tropes' page on game-breaking bugs includes such "gems" as a driving game where a bug makes it impossible to lose (Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing), a space game with the most unusable DRM ever recorded, preventing anyone from playing the game (Elite for ZX Spectrum) and a game that is capable of uninstalling other programs in the background due to extremely bad programming (UFO: Aftershock). At least with the Sims 2, the worst-case scenario is to reinstall one program...

Last edited by ieta_cassiopeia : 9th Apr 2013 at 02:43 AM.

Oh, I'm not saying that corporations are infallible. Obviously they do much worse things all the time (Monsanto, anyone?) But they tend to cover up those things so that it's not obvious to most people unless you are into activism or have a friend who is. Whereas a glitch in gameplay is something that everyone can notice whether they want to or not. I was just asking it more in a "how could this game succeed in the free market" sense. But I guess a lot of these bugs take a while to show up so for the average player it might not be as much of a problem as someone trying to create a legacy or who wants to play for years.

Ah, Big Rigs. I need to get that one day just to screw around with the complete lack of physics.

Sure, if you have base game.
Oh the other hand, if you have an expansion with Securom... well.

I recall playing an old shooter called Sin once. At the very first level my character got stuck, because there was an "invisible wall" in the room he needed to go to for a key! Restarting the game helped.

It was a funnily coded game. In one of the levels terrorists were so bright that one of them jumped from the roof to his death instead of fighting

But your examples are beyond crazy, a game uninstalling other programs in the background, I can't even imagine