[ARCHIVED] [V] [ROM] Occult eyes/features disappear when entering live mode

following up to say I am still having the same issues a few months later. I agree with a lot of the sentiment that these bugs affecting a lot of sims from legacy (and new saves) and this issue is making me play the game much less - only hoping on for event rewards and even then not playing the saves I like the most so those sims dont lose their occult features.

I thought to return to this bug report when I saw on my break the new 25 year birthday celebration video on YouTube and they mentioned the Occult Selector from the Sims Lab. While at first I thought yea I do like that feature in theory (nice idea to not lose all your work on a sim to change their occult type) - if its implementation causes the bug so occult sims to lose their features, what is the point? Who wants to go through the effort to make and play with  an occult sim when the features (which are part of DLC that was paid for and is what makes them look like they are in fact an occult sim) does not work?

Now I am not a coder and I am not sure that the new occult selector is what is causing these appearance bugs - however it does seem a bit in poor taste to bring up such a tool as an accomplishment when occult sims are broken/buggy for a large part of the user base.

I know a lot of people on the sims team care a lot about the game (not to mention they are employees and probably have a lot of pressure on them/decisions made for them from higher up)  and I do not post this to continually hate on what the sims team does - however it is getting harder to support a game developed by a triple A publisher who takes the money of a dedicated fan base and delivers a broken product.

I appreciate that recently the sims team has tried to be more open about bug fixes and what they are doing to work on issues - this bug report blog being an example of the good - however I still feel there is for sure a ways to go in improving communication. Like this has been a major bug for a lot of players (for a long time now) and it feels like little has been done to address this bug - in fairness that may not be true and the sims team might be trying hard to fix it behind the scenes - however I have not seen them say that anywhere. I know I would feel a bit better even if they came out and said they are trying to fix the problem even if they are having a hard time doing so or have not found a solution yet. Not to mention putting that information somewhere that is easy for players to access so we know what is actually being worked on. While I get it takes time to fix things and in coding/game development bugs do happen - people paid money for there features to work and should be looped in on whats going on when something goes wrong. I would also hope that maybe better communication could go aways to reduce some of the hate towards the sims team (not to mention while I think it is fair to air complaints - I would like to see it does in a respectful was and not personally attack anyone/make threats as that also hurts to see going on in the sims community).

I suppose the last thing I'd personally want to see is better quality assurance testing. From multiple broken packs (i.e. my wedding stories, glitchy infants on launch, etc.) to patches introducing new features at the expense of breaking old working ones - better testing (maybe limited opt-in player testing to limited number of players) before releasing patches to the entire player base giving the sims team more time between releasing new packs and whatnot to make sure they have the time to ensure everything is working (or at least the big features and making sure no large bugs arise) would be ideal.

I am also not sure to what extent at this point if  there are technological limitations (i.e. the game being originally developed in 2014/the engine the sims 4 runs on) can realistically keep up with the amount of DLC and more demanding features being implemented - even on higher end PCs. That point is why I was very discouraged at no plans for development for a Sims 5.

I am not sure what the future holds for the Sims, I have many fond memories of the Sims throughout the years (the Sims 4 included despite my criticisms) - but if going forward means more broken packs, bugs with long fix times (if ever), and in my opinion underwhelming gameplay for purchase price (which is a point that I understand is not the subject of this post but an issue I feel has been going on for a while for the Sims, EA, and the gaming industry as a whole in recent years) I am not sure it is worth continuing to buy anything new for the Sims 4 for the time being.