Hello, unfortunately I can only add to your list of problems with the Monte Vista and the Dragon Valley.. I recently bought both from the EA site and I'm experiencing problems with them that I never had before (I have almost all expansion packs with the last being the University Life). Monte Vista: the sims portraits disappear either as soon as one adopts a pet or after the first save so the game is impossible to play after that. I tried it couple of times with different families - one moved to the town and then couple of new games with local families - always the same result. Charging the people so much money for a town that does not support pets is unacceptable. Dragon Valley: i had twice the case that the game gets very very slow, almost like being put on pause - I can click and give orders, the game itself reacts, but the time in the game doesn't change as it should, the sims move in very slow motion one move every couple of real time minutes... Once in a while the game will jump the clock straight to the next day, but it will then again stay in this very slow pace. I get notifications that my sims job performance is dropping, because they are skipping work, but I cannot do anything to send them to work, until they exit their current room a whole sim day already passed.
I would like to clarify, that I don't have any mods, just the pure game content from EA. It is not hardware issue also - my PC is more than capable to cover the game demands.
As a working person I don't have much time to play, all the problems that I described here I had in a matter of hours so I'm really disappointed that such major issues were introduced into the game. I would appreciate to know how many other people experience the same problems and of course if there is a solution in sight for them.
Thank you for sharing your different experiences with me. I hope that EA will soon acknowledge their mistakes, though I highly doubt this. They seem to be primarily worried about how many games they can produce and how fast they can release them to the public, but couldn't care less about whether they function properly or not. I feel as if a great deal of us simmers have been cheated out of our money for faulty products. I would almost go so far as to say that this whole enterprise is a scam. Have you seen their help section? They blame nearly all of the problems we have with this game on our use of CC and our computers. Are they really that unwilling to admit that they make mistakes? Perhaps it would be excusable if there were only a few minor glitches in the game, but this is downright pathetic.
