Who asked for more phone use?

I play occult sims, I play adventures, I play quirky sims.

Why oh why do I have to watch them play with their phones.

I am so so happy that players are talking about this.

- Why is a possessed sim in Stranger Ville walking like a zombie then they check their phone and they are regular from the waist up.

- Why are mermaids texting under water when they should be out swimming.

I do not want to have a idle-animations with a phone. I have saves placed in Batuu or imaginary fantasy worlds or the middle ages. I look for the perfect CC to make a specific story come alive and then they pull out a phone.

I have too many packs for each and every one of the to have idle-animations every few seconds. These packs need to work together. I am very very upset over additional phone-animations that I cannot opt out of. You have made the phone mandatory because it connects with traveling, work and everything else so I cannot leave it behind. Fine. Then you start adding animations to it and now you are interfering with my stories, the very same reason that I started playing in the first place. My stories do not include phones.

Can you please make this game work for those who do not play present-day-phone-obsessive-sims!

"Who asked for more phone use?"

"I am very unhappy about this phone obsession. Don't like it in real life and definitely don't want it in my sims game."

This, very much this. I hate the excessive phone use...Phone while walking, phones while on a date, phones at the gym, phones while having normal conversations, etc and on and on. I'm surprised at this point that they don't have them out in the bath or shower.  Please get rid of this or give us options to disable or Something! I am just about to the point of uninstalling the High School expansion (and the preceding patch) as a mess and waste of my money.

I feel like this type of animation does not add much to the game. It's a bit presumptuous of EA to think that every sim from teen to elder would be using their phone this way. EA need to narrow it down for sims with certain traits, lifestyles and even careers that would only perform this animation. 

Phone use definitely should NOT be adjusted for age. It should be if the player wants it or not.

Granted that I'm brand new to the Sims franchise today as an actual offline human being in her mid-40s, but as far as I understood it, this game was meant so that you could create your own reality the way you wanted it to be. So sure, I would play a woman in her twenties- why on Earth would I pay to play what I already am- a middle aged woman? I do that for free! That's stupid. So as a Sim in my early twenties, I was a single mother of a toddler and an astronautical tech who is introverted and reads and writes a lot. Certainly NOT someone who- regardless of her young age- has the desire or time to be on the phone 24/7 (even as an actual human being back in my twenties, I never wanted nor had time for that kind of ish!).

What upsets me about this the most is that when I have commanded my Sim multiple times to freaking take care of her toddler, she won't get off the phone I never wanted her to be on in the first place. What took the cake for me was when my sweet baby escaped the house and there was no command I could invoke that would make my adult Sim get off her freaking phone to go take care of her baby. 

The phone use is ridiculous. I would never want it to begin with, but if there HAS to be an idle task, you should be able to select it yourself, such as "reading the book I packed in my bag" or whatever other idle action that matches the Sim's personality. For instance "reading the book in my bag" would match much more with my Sim's personality and my own desired reality than playing on the phone. That would also match the goals that the Sims 4 game has already set for my character based on her personality traits.

My Sims will not get off their phones. It doesn't matter what they are doing. I've only just started playing again after console technical problems for a few months. It's got much worse. Even just walking across the house to get breakfast, jogging or walking across their deck, running somewhere, eating meals, getting out of the shower. They don't look up from their phones. Even Sims who don't usually use their phones much at all.

Surely they are going to be doing something about this. It's beyond irritating.