What I don’t understand…

There is a fairly good community of modders and, while mods are always "user at your own risk" there a number of well respected ones whose content can be relied upon. Strangely enough, I've found most of my good mods by watching the "which mods are broken" reports that get posted every time there is a major update. I believe that the ones that get updated in response to an update give me a pretty good idea which modders are active and generally well respected members of the community.

Well, these are just my opinions, and I do use some CC and mods. All iterations of the game have had flaws, and all iterations used mods and CC. One luxury that modders and CC makers have over the Sims team is that they are usually modifying, not creating, code. Also, most people will cut them some slack if the CC tears, doesn’t fit some frames, etc. We hold Maxis to a higher standard, rightfully. A Maxis fix should work across multiple platforms, multiple gaming set ups, and take into account all packs, and not produce conflicts. A modders hot fix may not. You will find that any major update to game code will break mods and some CC. As for gameplay mods, they’ve always been a great way to customize our personal games without Maxis foisting those preferences on everyone else. It avoids the “I never wanted this in my game, OMG, it’s ruined” reactions. By leaving some gameplay to mods, we have increased customization to personal preferences.

Mods are usually safe. Some may not be updated and that can cause problems for your game, but most modders update with every patch or pack. Yes, there are mods out there that are not family friendly. Those that break the game’s Teen rating can’t be discussed here. If you use a lot of mods and cc it does require some maintenance. That’s why I keep mine down to just those I find essential to my style of play.

The modding section of this forum is a great place for information on mods and cc.

I would guess that modders have more freedom to push things out quickly without having to coordinate with a large team about how their code fits into the game long-term, works with other existing features, breaks features, creates lag. They can just release whatever they want.

I've said this in many, many posts ..... my theory is that modders can enhance the game and "fix annoying things" because they actually play the game! As a player, they have gotten fed up with this illogical gameplay aspect or that irritating bug or want to tone down the over-zealousness of certain obsessions (which seems to be the devs priority when implementing "new" things).

I think EA hires people to work on a certain pack or gameplay element because they know how to do that particular task, but doesn't mean that person actually understands (or has ever played) TS4.

Plus, when they create new packs, I'm almost positive that they only test those features using the "new pack" and the basegame, never with every single EP, GP, SP, and kit installed because there is absolutely NO WAY that they wouldn't run into some of the issues players have if they had all packs installed when testing.

And, I feel like when they are "testing" they are simply just testing the mechanics of things, and not doing an actual play-through game session as if they are a player (such as the aging bug or the groundhog day bug), if they had created a new family and played with them for a few hours doing normal things that regular simmers typically do, they'd have discovered those same bugs as well.

I agree that modders won't need to go by all the restrictions that EA must commit to. If EA team decided not to focus on "shaving legs", it would not really make a difference whether some EA employee came up with a brilliant shave legs feature. A modder could add that feature without needing to c heck what EA thinks of it. And then there is animation quality etc. Modders do a great job, but I guess some of them might have been ditched if it was an EA supported feature to be added. Personally I find some *not perfect* mods to work wonders with my game, but I base much of my game on imagination. I also can deal with lag without pulling my hear out. Other simmers prefer best possible graphics or zero lag.

Traditionally modders and CC creators were a great deal of the sims series. I think EA has expressed that they appreciate the creative community, meaning they probably see it as a good thing that EA is not covering every single aspect, but leaving tidbits to the modders has become an important side of this game.

I think the main reason why Maxis are not adding too many options and features like mods do is because it adds to their budget and their development process, offering too many options will add to their development time, they have to make everything in a pack after all.

But still, there are some features and lack of settings which really surprises me, I recently downloaded a mod which disables the Thrift Store notification from High School Years, because Maxis set that one to trigger every day. Why on earth did they do that?

Game developers don't have the freedom that game modders do. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes approval processes that need to be coordinated by the team, schedules to be met, and developers often have to request higher ups to grant them more time on a project which often gets rejected because to the higher ups, meeting the deadline is more important than something finished. Something like My Wedding Stories was clearly rushed out, and it's very likely playtesters for that already played the pack and reported on the bugs we are already aware of (it's not like those bugs are very well-hidden, anyone who has played the pack can immediately tell it's in a slipshod state), but the higher ups didn't grant extra time to iron out the flaws, so the pack gets shipped out in a buggy, broken state. This is also a reason they can fix the bugs extremely quickly when the problems get serious enough, such as the aging bug.

Modders don't need to work on a schedule, they don't need a budget, and don't need to request upper management to grant them extensions. That's the single biggest advantage they have compared to paid professionals. While they don't have access to the source code and need to painstakingly tear the game apart to learn about it, they can still know enough about it to fix many oversights the game has, plus more.

"Chicklet453681;c-18186360" wrote:
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I think EA hires people to work on a certain pack or gameplay element because they know how to do that particular task, but doesn't mean that person actually understands (or has ever played) TS4.
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@Chicklet453681 Imma have to agree with you on that one, given the profiles of some of the employees I've read on this site. I think only one mentioned she actively played the sims, the others were new to the sims

My quick and dirty answer to this is that why should they, if the modding community is doing it without costing EA anything? Free labor.