How are you feeling about the sims 4 and its current state ?

I'm normally the one with the positive attitude towards TS4, but lately not so much. The situation going on with mods, perma-paywalling, harassment, and the new vague and easily-abused Early Access ruling had me so furious that I nearly left the community because of it. I realise now that it's no good if I leave the community over that- I just have to make sure to be a positive member of the community, try to speak out about toxicity where I can, and not support awful creators. If I can spread some kind of joy talking about my game and creations with people here then I should. I feel like de-monetisation of mods would have been the start of a potential solution to the problem, then EA backtracked. For that I am reluctant to buy any more content for a while regardless of how much I want it.

As for the state with bugs and such, it's been MUCH more noticeable as I've switched to PC play. I used to never dread Patch Day on my Xbox :D Part of me feels like it's just a normal part of modern gaming nowadays and I wish it wasn't. Thanks to patches being easy to download mostly nowadays and the mad crunch-time generally put on game devs in big companies now, it means a lot of games or expansions get released more or less unfinished and it's not great for players, devs, and eventually not for the big companies either because people lose faith and stop giving them money.

I'm mainly a builder and storyteller in TS4 now, but I have been asking myself lately...is it just because I like storytelling more? Or is it because I got bored of gameplay that I have more fun with storytelling and building? I wonder if it's the latter. So many new mechanics got added in High School Years and I still had little interest in the pack itself. At one point I wanted more mechanics to aid in meaningful in-game relationships and such (and I wanted some things back from older games in the series), but now some of that is happening it still doesn't make me want to get back into gameplay.

Melisendre's point about cross-pack compatibility is an important one actually. I would have liked more of that especially with the Werewolves pack, though we did get a bit I guess, and I'd like more of it going forward. The way I feel at the moment generally, is I would rather have the current game polished up a bit rather than a bunch of new content (though I did enjoy Werewolves and finally getting more occult stuff). The Spa Day pack refresh was great, and I remember quite a lot of us were pretty excited about it. I think starting from the older packs, I'd rather have pack refreshes and bug fixes be the focal point.