Why it is partially "our fault" that issues and bugs aren't getting solved

I make it a point to visit the Bug Reports forum just about every day that I plan to play, specifically to see what bugs people are saying they have and to see if I run into them as well, in an effort to help provide those upvotes and investigate issues. 

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I also find there are some users who outright refuse to believe their mods or CC could be the root cause of an issue.  It's widely believed, wrongly, that CC never causes issues, and that's very much not the case, it's just significantly less often than mods having issues.  As someone who plays with mods and CC myself, I always investigate bugs with a clean and fresh save, specifically so that I can rule out that variable.  We all have to take a certain amount of accountability that, if we're going to use third-party content, we can't throw blame on the EA team because a patch breaks a mod.  It's not EA's responsibility to code their game around what other people create for it.  That being said, there are plenty of times that people assume an issue is mod or CC-related, and then you find out it's a console player who obviously cannot use either, or a PC player who has never once used any third-party content.  We sometimes need to find ways to ask the right questions in order to better help others articulate how they found a particular bug, as well as not jump to conclusions when trying to help each other.

I would ideally like an in-game bug reporting system, but maybe that's years of playing certain types of games which that format works for, and TS4 is a great deal more complex than some of those.  Otherwise, I do think the original posters should make an effort to check back with any additional findings, see if anyone else has come across the issue or possibly found a workaround in the interim, or in cases where the devs would like more info, be able to help fill in any blanks that may help the team further investigate.

That's a very valid point. I've had like two situational bugs I've reported put on hold awaiting additional info and I get that cause it was only one other person that up voted on it, but that's only because they've noticed the bug too, I do wonder how many players are also affected but just haven't noticed or dismissed it as just normal video game nonsense or like you say can't be bothered/too busy with life to report it. Also the fewer votes a report has the lower it falls down the list visable on the forums and then you need to filter just to find it. The compiled list of bug reports and issues is a crucial first place to look for us players to look before putting in a bug report, it's something we should all do first. I wonder if they don't fix these small bugs because of the problems that come with adding an update, I'm sure the whole player base wouldn't be best pleased if an update totally screwed their game up because a few people noticed a bug they themselves had no idea existed. A touch of damage control on the devs side maybe? 🤔

This is the long and the short of it.

I understand the premise of the current format in which bugs are prioritized, and sympathize that devs can't just spend countless hours investigating every report without upvotes. But some obvious bugs/issues with not too difficult fixes ignored because the average/casual player cannot be bothered, because they have a life and they can't upvote/report every bug. The harder bugs/issues even if obvious still won't make the list as again, because the average/casual player cannot be bothered/have a life and they can't upvote every bug reported by others.

It reminds me of a discussion with another site where devs were actively discussing changes with the community, but basically said "You are just the vocal minority" and ignored us, and well that is who is on your forums, why not take the reports/feedbacks from your vocal minority then, if they aren't the majority, as the silent majority is that—silent.

While I agree with you about some of this (aggro posts, complaining on other forums, etc.), the bottom line is that it should NOT require a significant amount of time or analysis on the part of the player to report a bug. We have lives and most of us have jobs, families, and other commitments. 

If it is overly cumbersome to report bugs (or if the devs are going to ignore all bug reports that are not sufficiently intricate), then realistically, most people are NOT going to take hours to do a deep dive on their bug reports. Instead, they will become irritated, stop playing, stop buying DLC, and badmouth the game to other prospective players. That's just the way it is. So, yes, I think when we have recurring issues, we should make a good faith effort to provide as much information as possible, and do it in a civil manner. But at the end of the day, EA is trying to sell us a product, not the other way around. 

I am not a moderator, but I would assume that they are more knowledgeable about how the system works. 

The impression that I am getting is that while some posts might ending up not being reported or followed up on... the system is working as intended, unhelpful reports or posts like you mentioned are being removed or moved or ending up further down the list and helpful reports are getting votes and moved further up.

They could probably improve the error searching by adding an AI assistant. Users could type errors like "my sims are standing still" and it could link to existing reports. That AI would have to be trained on common errors though which could be difficult, as many errors are kind of unique and it's difficult to know what the error is based on just a description. The moderators are already doing a very impressive job sorting these reports and I don't want to tell anyone what they should do.

Something that I do wish that we had though and I listed this in a a post Cade made a while back is that bugs are being prioritized based on severity as some bugs are very prevalent during gameplay (like the weather bug that we had or the bug which caused animals from cottage living to die of old age despite that setting being turned off). But it looks like they might do that sometimes as several of the bugs that I listed in that post have been solved, so I am thankful for that.

The best way is if we all give as much info about our problems as possible. Including the update version number, what pack we see it in the most, console or pc player, mods & cc or none, cheats used or no cheats etc anything of importance I imagine really helps narrow things down for the bug team, cause just saying "this is a bug fix it" and then never replying again, like what are they meant to do with that? Like everything in life things are sorted into priority,  two players in six months have noticed a particular bug so it's low priority as you rightly say and gets put on the back burner, but over a thousand players in under a month, of course that will get fixed as it very well should be, it's clearly high priority. No game is perfect and it's mainly down to us to fix them by reporting the bugs we find. 

Work together and work... nobody wants a surtain in it, But yeah bug fixes are great, like LAG, to long and stuff