I posted a thread at EA HQ about this, when I learned today that the hack for Steam stopped working around November of last year.
It's beginning to look more and more like a killswitch. If it is, that is insane. People literally spent money to not only build but play custom worlds. Literally, I wouldn't have bought Showtime or Island Paradise if I hadn't learned how to build my own worlds. I think a lot of players who played custom worlds were the same way, were encouraged to keep buying additional content to play custom worlds. For instance, many of them would've quit Sims 3 after IP indefinitely had world builders not provided island worlds that didn't suffer the lag of Isla Paradiso.
I'm hoping that this is just an oversight, but if it was "decided" to kill off CAW, I hope that people understand that this is anti-consumer and that it serves EA nothing to alienate the Sims 3 player base. Many of us went back to TS3 because TS4 started off great and then began taking the "sand" out of the "sandbox" and alienating older players by making things happen against their will for the sake of realism (like making female sims develop buddha bellies and gain weight after giving birth). I literally quit TS4 after that laundry SP, because I knew that's when the entire thing was going south and had become an embarrassing and in some cases creepy "real life simulator".
So, if TS3 and CAW are being tampered with to discourage us into moving onto TS4, just know that we won't. I can't speak for everyone but I can speak for myself. Some of us go all the way back to TS1, when it was a sandbox game and not a life simulator. TS2 and TS3 carried that tradition. TS4 was going great for awhile (I absolutely adored it, especially the character designs), but then it seemed to become some creepy real life simulator for awkward GenZs and Millennials trying to use this game to experience real life or deal with image and body issues.
The point is, do not kill CAW or TS3. You will be alienating a much larger portion of the Sims player base than you suspect. The fact that social media is heavily dominated by GenZs and Millennials squealing over every TS4 update doesn't mean that TS3 is dead as a game. It just means that because TS4 is trending, you can make the most money right now being a social media influencer on YouTube, Patreon and other venues than you can TS3, TS2 or the original game.
