Soooo about Mods...

Mariesalias wrote:
Amjoie, I have the utmost respect and fondness for you. It certainly was not my intention to start a debate or argument! :(

I am sorry you had a bad experience with Twallan's mods; I think you may be the first person I have ever read who has, where it was not user error. (I am not implying your issue was, you are too methodical with issues to make foolish mistakes!)

I have to admit I had not read the thread when I posted, and afterwards, I just glanced through it (too little free time with school out for summer!). I saw the mention of AwesomeMod and just wanted to add the additional information as I know that many people do not realize that your saves won't work without it in.

I used AM before I ever tried Twallan's mods (my husband's choice; he was tired of having to fix my game when EA kept messing it up!). This is going back a few years now so maybe the mod is completely different now, but it kept causing issues with my game back then so I removed it and found out the hard way, that every save I'd played with it in was unplayable.

I then did my own research and found Twallan's mods and they saved my game and allowed me to continue playign TS3. The NRAAs mods, along with advice from you and Writin_Reg, have allowed me to play the huge, bustling, alive towns I like and control as much or as little of the town as I want. I can't say it runs completely smoothly, I put too many demands on Story Progression for me to be able to play without any lag! But even with all these mods in, my game plays better then it ever did without any mods in.

I think Mods can be personal things. We all have our favorites and what is right for one person may not be right for another. Thankfully, TS3 has had very talented modders enabling anyone to play the game just about any way they want to. :)

I have respect for you and all the people who use the NRAAS suite, too. And literally everyone praises them. I positively KNOW that NRAAS has saved big and old games from exploding, because so many people say the only way they can play their game is to use the mod suite. And I don't want to make people feel bad about their chosen mods, either. Everyone has to play what works for them.

I didn't mention it, earlier, because at this late date it makes no difference. But the awesome mod, previously, needed constant updating, each time an EP/SP or patch was released. The first few versions he put out were always buggy, and people who followed his mod actually expected that, and did a flurry of bug reports to help him squash the inevitable bugs. I used to redownload his mod several times the first week, and sometimes more than once on the first day it was released. But in a short time, the awesome mod stabilized. And then it could go several weeks before needing an update. Regardless, I always updated weekly, just because he did tweaking to the mod, rather constantly.

Pescado knew people would most likely want to download his mod, and never think about it again, so he put an expiration date on it where it would stop playing unless redownloaded. However, waiting until then to redownload most likely meant playing the game for quite some time on a beta mod, rather than a fully tweaked mod.

I was never particularly vocal about recommending the awesome mod simply because it required a good deal of work to keep up with it, and because it could not be removed from a save. In fact, if the topic came up, it was usually to warn people it couldn't be removed, and wasn't for the faint of heart.

Now, though, the awesome mod is nearly in its final form. And it works better than any other mod out there. So I took the opportunity to say something, for the sake of people just considering mods, for the first time.

I used awesome mod ever since I started modding my long ago sims game. I trusted Pescado's expertise long, long before TS3 came out. So the transition from earlier sim games to TS3 was natural for me.

Twallen appeared on the scene with TS3, and offered an alternative to awesome mod, with a different philosophical approach, and what appeared (in the beginning) to be a "safer" approach. And Twallen got rave reviews, which I watched closely. But since I already trusted awesome mods, from previous games, I stayed with what I knew, especially since it was a "choose only one" situation.

In the very beginning, I occasionally slipped Master Controller into a factory reset game to take a peek at it, and it wasn't ever a good fit for me. It was way too much in-game fussing to accomplish the same thing awesome mod did quietly in the background. So I ignored NRAAS, for years.

In fact, for most of TS3, I ignored all the other small mods, as well. It got to the point that the only mod I used was awesome, because I just got tired of having to redownload several mods every couple months, especially since many early TS3 small modders made a couple useful mods and then disappeared, rather than doing the constant updating each EP/SP/patch. Which was grueling, to be sure.

And I always had an entirely mod-free game I played, as well, because I wanted to keep up with how the game acted entirely mod-free, since many people played that way. (I talked much more about my mod-free game on this forum, than I ever did about my awesome modded game.)

It has only been fairly recently that I have shopped widely for my "final" group of mods. I am determined to find just the right combination of mods that give me a smooth, safe, "played my way" game. And I haven't entirely decided what that will look like, yet.

It was because I have had my eye on Traveler for quite some time, that I decided to give NRAAS another try, shortly before Twallen quit modding. I was disappointed when I tried it. So I went back to awesome mod. Then after the other group of modders took over the mod, I decided to try it again, to see if the things I didn't like had been fixed. Nope, they hadn't. And Traveler was one of the most glitchy parts of the suite. So, I gave up on that dream. Regretfully.

I hesitated to say anything about my experiences with NRAAS. Primarily because I didn't want to make anyone feel bad and/or defensive about their favorite mod suite. But then I thought maybe a lone voice of caution might help someone just starting out, and I decided to take the unpopular stance.

All I wanted to do was give people a viable choice, and tell them to try things out, in their own game, so they could see for themselves and choose wisely for THEIR game. Because no two games are the same, and no one, in the final analysis, can make the choice but the players, themselves.

NRAAS will always save old, nearly ready to explode games. Awesome mod will always give smooth as silk play to optimized games. Most people will fall somewhere in between, and need to make informed choices. I just want happy simmers, so choose what works best for you, and never look back. :D

edit to fix quote, so it showed up blue and second edit because I fail at editing :P