I'm sure there are as many answers to the question as there is players, from those who has kept the same save for 10+ years without letting go to those who constantly start new saves, but for you, when do you know that it's time to let go?
People around here know, I let go when the save gets hopelessly corrupted. However, I've yet to totally let go of my Cantrell family, particularly Erik Cantrell. This go-around, since I do a Save As with every gaming session, I was able to rollback time, so to speak, to find them shortly after they arrived back on Earth. My time frame is somewhere in the 23rd Century. The family was living on Vulcan, where they were finally able to find some solid financial footing. Then Joseph Cantrell, Sr.'s uncle passed away leaving the family heritage to the proper heir, his nephew, eldest son of his late older brother. The uncle then moved into the Cantrell House (in Del Sol Valley) to finish raising his newly orphaned nieces and nephews. Now, that we've got a new expansion to work with, I may change up said inheritance . . . Just sayin'.
I do have an 'end' in mind, but oddly enough, before I can get the family to that point, the game goes corrupt on me. I have often just began again. Do you think my Sims are working against me? I stopped going back to their beginnings, but since we were moving to these new forums, I decided to start with Joseph and Louise Cantrell and their first two children, Aaron, a toddler, and Erik who was born in space.
I play a lot of rotational. It is not uncommon for some bugs to be house-specific. Like one of my beach lots, constantly bugged with people swimming through the floors and students coming home mid-school day. If I travel with a parent and then return home before the kids are supposed to be home (I had to finally move the household out and back in to fix that one). It is like the lot itself becomes the cause of the bug. It was also hit-or-miss which household was affected by the black photo bug until the January bug hit them all, so I played for the first 48 hours after the update.
Weirdly enough, some bugs resolve just by switching households and then switching back. Also, some of the smaller bugs and glitches can be at least temporarily fixed by going to manage worlds and right back into the active family. I just had to do this to get a completed formative moment to actually disappear from the list so I could pick a new one.
Possible reasons this could happen:
With all the changes of the last few years, I plan to try to create a new rotational save/forever world, doing a few things differently with neighborhood stories and non-played aging than I did the first time, but my big old save will never be deleted (unless by some weird accident).
I'm so intrigued by your answers, but surprised that so many of us seem to let go only when the game makes us. Having just said goodbye myself to a two year old save, partly because it was so heavy to play with all the bugs, I can't imagine how you keep your saves going for 5, 6 or 10 years. Granted, I do use a lot of mods so maybe that's my own fault.
I play with a set of sims that started in 2015 with the Renegades/Villareal and by now has a stable cast of six main families and a ton of supporting townies. However, the actual saves I play these sims in are short-lived. Often I have a clear goal or follow challenge rules.
When I feel that I have achieved a happy end I take notes how my sims grew and start over in a different setting. I need the sims be happy and their world reasonably nice before I bring down the curtain.
An exception is my 1760s save. I planned to only temporarily abandon it to test horses in a different save, but I grew so attached to that new save that it lasted for months and then my interest in historical gameplay had vaned.
